What Is the Point Of All This?

Fundamentally, this is a question of identity: When you identify yourself with a team, whether you choose it or not, meaning attaches to you. This is more true for fans who embrace the identity, but still, when you’re a fan, you carry that baggage.

In 2026, what does it mean to identify with the Kansas City Current?

At the CPKC Stadium season opener on Saturday, March 14th, 2026, I saw a fan with a custom Kansas City Current jersey, with Renėe Good’s name on the back.

They prompted this essay, for better or worse.

This winter, during the Second Trump Administration’s civil war in Minnesota, I’ve become active in organizing. No need to get into specifics, but during this winter of despair, sometimes I’d get by thinking about the spring thaw and walking the Missouri Riverfront Heritage Trail to CPKC Stadium to watch the Kansas City Current.

Last year, I fell for the Current more than any team I’ve ever loved: The 1985 Royals, 2008 and 2022 Kansas Jayhawks Men’s Basketball, 2013 Sporting KC, the Mahomes Era Chiefs Dynasty–even the magical 2014 and 2015 Royals that, I believe, helped prompt Kansas City into investing in itself and becoming one of the model mid-sized cities in the United States. There’s a reason three of the top seven men’s World Cup teams chose their base camps here. The Soccer Capital of American thing is real.

Some of Us Have Been Doing This Since The Wizards Played in Arrowhead

Still, there’s something unique to the Kansas City Current.

It wasn’t the Supporters Shield: In Kansas City, we’ve punched above our weight in championship parades.

More than any American city, in Kansas City the NWSL team is visible: the streetcar, the merch, the flags, the shop on the Plaza, it’s everywhere. The Longs and Mahomes invested in a women’s team, building not only a stadium, but an entire entertainment district on the literal dumping ground for the collapsed roof of Kemper Arena from the 1970s. It prompted the city to create a rail line to the Missouri River, almost single-handedly reconnecting Kansas City to its roots as a river town.

Beyond the business, though, the Kansas City Current’s supporters make it stand for something beyond sports: They use sports to create an inclusive space, when sports culture in the United States is mostly toxic and MAGA-coded. This includes the Kansas City Current ownership group, especially Brittany Mahomes, who Donald Trump has praised by name multiple times:

Patrick Mahomes’ Mother Randi on the Eve of the 2024 Election.

These two things—ownership and the supporters groups—are in conflict. It’s not an open-war conflict—there are no “Sell the Team” signs—but the tension is there. This is true to different degrees with every sports franchise, but with the NWSL, it’s unavoidably political.

Sports is always political–especially soccer clubs, which are literally rooted in associations of churches, neighborhoods, working class professions, and political groups. Even in non-soccer sports, like when Fox News’ Laura Ingraham told Lebron James to “Shut Up and Dribble,” she was responding to Black journalist Cari Champion’s interview with Lebron and Kevin Durant, where Lebron talked openly about the difficulties of Black celebrity, a racial slur vandalized on his house, and President Trump’s racism.

In sports, there is no Shut Up and Dribble. Among other works, Lebron’s foundation opened the “I Promise” Elementary School–as an Akron Public Schools district school! He dropped the “U bum” tweet!

Conservatives have to admit that sports is always political: The whole nation witnessed the embarrassing spectacle of FIFA President Gianni Infantino “awarding” President Trump the entirely fake “FIFA Peace Prize.”

In a way that is easy to memory hole, but gets to the heart of the matter, so it is with the Kansas City Current. When ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renėe Good, her and her wife Becca’s SUV had a KC Current sticker. They were fans of the club, having lived in my Waldo neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Anyone who chooses to see the incident clearly understands: She was murdered for being a lesbian, with a wife who was not properly deferential to a man who saw them as less than human.

She wasn’t murdered for being a Current fan, of course, but her identity helps us understand why women’s sports fandom is a political act, why in this moment, being a Current fan at CPKC Stadium is a political act, whether fans choose it or not. Don’t take my word for it: Newsmax said as much in their coverage of her murder. We will get to all that.

What Is the Point of Sports Fandom?

Let’s start at the beginning.

For me, Roger Bennett–the impresario of the Men in Blazers, who has turned a podcast with his English-in-America ex-pat buddy Michael Davies into a soccer media empire–offers the clearest answer:

Making Memories.

His favorite phrase is “a sense of wonder,” that when we go to a soccer match, we don’t know what we’re going to experience, but as long as we have a sense of endeavor, of courage, of collective spirit, we can conjure joy or take comfort by sharing our grief.

Let’s dive deeper. Rog is an unlikely sports media warlord: A lad from Thatcher-era Liverpool who got obsessed with American culture, moved to the United States to become a sportswriter, all of which he documents in (Re)born in the USA: An Englishman’s Love Letter to His Chosen Home. Rog also frequently quotes English poetry from memory on every single podcast.

Bennett is undoubtedly the most well-read sports talker in America, and certainly can draw on more Phillip Larkin than the rest of the sports talkers combined. Here’s Rog reading Larkin’s “There Be the Verse”.

Listening to Rog is an emotional journey: The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of Defeat in the same episode. Rog’s humanity carved out Men in Blazers’ niche in the sports world: MiB exists for fans of all soccer clubs to feel their feelings. At its best, Men in Blazers is the communal experience for just, you know, dealing with whatever your team is putting you through right now.

Thinking about Roger Bennett got me to thinking about “The Age of Johnson,” the 18th Century school of “Doctrinal Criticism” associated with the poet and critic–and inventor of the dictionary–Samuel Johnson. The Age of Johnson was characterized by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s (both Bennett faves) pioneering work in Lyrical Ballads, which marked a transition from Enlightenment-based reason to more Romantic-based feeling in poetry.

The Age of Johnson is also called The Age of Sensibility. Why? Writing later in the Modernist Era, the critic E.R. Dodds cited Johnson in his famous essay “On Misunderstanding Oedipus Rex” for the purpose of Greek Theater:

The true function of the artist, which I should be disposed to define, with Dr. Johnson, as “the enlargement of our sensibility.”

For the Greeks, theater dramatizes emotions that exist, mostly, at the extremes of our lives. To process these meaningful moments, we prepare ourselves for feeling these things by experiencing them first in the constructed world of the theater. The dramatist, then, stages the play so we feel these emotions in something unreal that simulates the real, provoking the response of pathos or terror or joy or despair or whatever the emotion may be.

If sports is theater, this is what happens in our fandom: Through the simulated drama of sport, we enlarge our sensibility to feel things that we wouldn’t normally feel. This often makes us angry at our rivals and bitter towards those who failed us, but at its best–the way the Greeks used theater as a quasi-religious ritual–sports fandom can bring us together because we share the common human experience of……being a fan, with all that means.

It’s what makes soccer the most important of the least important things:

The sense of wonder we experience at the soccer match.

Samuel Johnson Holding Court at The Literary Club, an 18th Century Dinner Club Where Johnson and the Boys Would Discuss Important Matters of the Day. Today They Would Likely be Chelsea Supporters and Frown On Arsenal’s Reliance on Corners as Too Working Class.

If we cross two English media moguls from different eras, for Charles Dickens and Roger Bennett, sometimes It Was the Best of Times, like when you get your American Citizenship::

Sometimes It Was the Worst of Times, like when your team loses:

Sports Fandom as Identity

This is a complicated question, which is answered differently in soccer. American professional sports teams like baseball, football, basketball, and hockey are “franchises”: Explicitly business operations, run by an ownership group, to make a profit. They were created as capitalist enterprises, rooted in the invention of Sports as a Business in the early 20th century. This was the Gilded Age and the Roaring 20s, when cities boomed, disposable income abound, and transportation brought cities closer together. This is why there is more team relocation in the United States than in world soccer: Franchises are businesses that aren’t necessarily “rooted” in the community.

In the rest of the world, most soccer teams are “clubs”: They grew out of a tradition of sporting clubs, where the men of the community would play sports together. They were deeply rooted not just in cities, but in neighborhoods. Clubs were often named after professions, church groups, or social clubs. This is why London has 17 professional clubs: A combination of neighborhood-centric growth, public transportation, and economic growth.

This is also where football clubs get their identity: In their roots, they became a “Badge of Identity”, where your choice of a club signaled your personal values, class, and politics.

Then, as these clubs grew bigger and more organized, they would travel to neighboring clubs for competitive matches, and the system grew from there. Over time, of course, these “clubs” became businesses where players were paid, and as such, not actually from the community.

So, the identity of soccer clubs has flattened as the business has gotten bigger, but because supporters pass on their support to their kids, the strongest club identities get passed through the generations. This dynamic is why powerful supporters groups sometimes actually have an ownership stake in the team, or actual representation in the boardroom. And, because they are organized to act as collectives, they can wield real power. This community grounding is why it’s very rare for European soccer clubs to move–and in American soccer, it’s why soccer clubs have organized and influential supporters groups that wield influence not seen in traditional American sports franchises.

Manchester United Fans Protesting the Glazer Family’s Ownership in 2025. The Green and Gold are Symbols of the Protest, Recalling United’s Roots as Newton Heath in 1878, When the Club Was Founded as a Working Class Association That Grew Out of the Horrors of Industrial Factories in the Manchester Textile Industry.

Who Is A Sports Team, Exactly?

If the point of sports fandom is making memories that enlarge our sensibility, then who makes the memories that define our team? Who is it that defines the team’s identity?

A modern sports franchise isn’t a unified block of like-minded, like-positioned fans. It’s a complex mix of ownership, front office leadership, players, club legends, and, of course, the fans. The franchise’s stage is the stadium, the city, the neighborhood, the local bar scene, which can be characters in themselves.

All of this combines into a unique identity, but within that, there are main characters. They give you your “ness.”

Sometimes, especially in the billion dollar leagues, some franchises are, more or less, the Team Owner. They basically operate like absolute monarchs, and especially in the NFL, franchises are family businesses passed by heredity to the children. In this dynamic, the owners make themselves the Main Character of the drama: Jerry Jones is the Dallas Cowboys, trading his best players for no reason, making vibes-based draft picks, installing his son Stephen as the heir apparent.

Sometimes it’s front office leadership. This is a newer phenomenon in the “management” age of sports. How could you think about the Oakland A’s without Billy Beane, or the curse-breaking Red Sox and Cubs teams without Theo Epstein?

Sometimes it’s Club Icons: Who are the Yankees without the names and numbers in Monument Park? The Steel Curtain. The Hogs. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. These groups transcend the magical seasons to become permanent parts of the lore.

Sometimes there’s a magical chemistry where the city embraces the current team to transform the city itself, in real time weaving themselves into the lore: We know this well in Kansas City with the 2014-15 Kansas City Royals and the Mahomes-Era Chiefs.

In some special situations, the fans themselves are the identity. This is where franchises begin to feel more like clubs. The fans, as a group, take on a specific personality: Bills Mafia, Philly Fans, the St Louis Cardinals’ Best Fans In Baseball, Raider Nation.

Often, the stadium itself is a main character, not just as a stage for the theater, but so inextricable from the team that it’s a synecdoche for the franchise: Lambeau Field, Arrowhead Stadium Tailgating, Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, etc.

The Main Character of the Kansas City Current Drama

Who Is the Kansas City Current? What Is the Identity?

The one thing nobody will ever be able to take from the Current: The first stadium in the world custom built and owned by a women’s sports franchise.

It’s the first stadium in the world where a women’s sports club could make memories in a place of their own.

At its best, when I think of the most memorable moments at CPKC Stadium, I think of people celebrating each other. Not just victories–we only have one major trophy and have suffered some catastrophic defeats over the past two years–but as a place to share each other’s joy and sorrow.

It’s where we celebrate moments.

I mean, we are the home of the Celly Queen, Lo’eau Labonta.

The Supporters Shield, of course.

Or when then- Ellie Wheeler’s boyfriend Roman Bravo-Young proposed on the field. He kneels, presents the ring, she says yes, jump-hugs him…..and then turns around a sprints to her teammates, who mosh to celebrate her friend. He’s just…standing there.

Or when the CPKC Stadium crowd chanted “We Want Lo!” so loudly that we more or less bullied coach Emma Hayes to sub her in so we could celebrate our captain.

Or when Claire Hutton picking up her “Bestie” (with a homemade sign) Ally Sentnor at the airport after she was traded to the Current.

Or when two-time league MVP Temwa Chawinga sprinted all the way across the field to embrace her coach Vlatko Andonovsky.

Or Croix Bethune’s birthday goal curtsey and blowing out the candles.

Or smaller moments, like when Halie Mace embraced her girlfriend, now fiance, Rafaelle Souza after last year’s match against Orlando.

It’s Club President Raven Jemison–one of the few LGBTQIA+ Black women in the corporate sports world–celebrating being cancer-free after a breast cancer diagnosis.

Club President Raven Jemison Does It All for the Kansas City Current.

My first memory of CPKC Stadium is from the first time I walked through the gates during the Season Ticket Holder preview in 2024. Basically, a trial run: walk through security, find your seats, pick out your food vendors, see the field, get the pre-game routine. But most importantly, revel in the fact that this is the only stadium in the world built for women.

On the concourse, I saw a lesbian couple in Current gear wearing bridal headpieces. They were celebrating their post-rehearsal at CPKC Stadium. They were taking pictures on the concourse, later they were down behind the goal in the supporter’s section, framing pictures towards the goal, scoreboard, and the Missouri River.

While in line for Yoli’s nachos, I remember saying something about the venue. One lady said, yeah, we couldn’t do this at the Arrowhead, The K, T-Bones Stadium, Children’s Mercy Park, “Or that high school football field they used to play on.”

My Family Headed to CPKC Stadium for the First Time

For me, this is the Kansas City Current. They are the main characters.

They are who gives the Kansas City Current their identity. Most NWSL supporter groups explicitly create LGBTQIA+ friendly spaces, and they are in coalition with each other to make the NWSL a safe space. But Kansas City is the only space where the stadium was built for, and owned by, a women’s team itself.

And, because of that, on Opening Day 2026 when walking through the gates at Helzberg Plaza, I thought about Kansas City Current fans Renėe and Becca Good, their children, and their dog.

I did not know them and don’t know if they ever attended a game, but the supporters who define Kansas City Current fandom have made CPKC Stadium a place *exactly* for people like them. So much so that on Saturday, someone wore a Current jersey with her name customized on the back.

This was a stark reminder that CPKC Stadium’s identity is created by the Kansas City Current supporters sections–the Blue Crew, Surface Tension, Undertow and others–which has explicitly made CPKC Stadium a LGBTQIA+ and non-white embracing space. In American 2026, this is a political act.

The Tension Between Ownership and Supporters Has Very Real Stakes.

Renėe Good was murdered by a federal agent who, if you choose to see what happened clearly, was triggered by the presence of a lesbian couple that wasn’t properly scared of him. She had a pulse for 15 minutes while ICE denied her access to a doctor, bleeding out while her spouse Becca was next to her, and their elementary kid’s toys were stuffed in the glove compartment and the door. The dog was in the back seat.

Hours later, prominent Newsmax host Greg Kelly tweeted, and then went on air, saying TOTALLY JUSTIFIED SHOOTING!!!! NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!

And pointed to the stickers on the back of Renėe and Becca’s car. Greg Kelly went into character assassination mode to justify the murder, trying to paint Renėe and Becca as some sort of “domestic terrorists” who “deserved” to be shot.

Guilt by Association. He asked what “WACK JOB” groups and affiliations are these?

Apparently, the Kansas City Current is a WACK JOB group that gives ICE agents “federal immunity” to murder you.

This guy has no idea what the Kansas City Current is, only cares about women’s sports to use it to bully trans women. But in a sense, he’s right: In the MAGA worldview, if you are LGBTQIA+, then any organization that celebrates this is, by law, a Domestic Terror Organization. The Kansas City Current won’t get the Antifa label from the government, but it is a WACK JOB space where LGBTQIA+ love can be celebrated through our collective enjoyment of women’s soccer.

This simple, human act of celebration makes LGBTQIA+ friendly gatherings contested political spaces. The NWSL is that space.

This is why you rarely see openly LGBTQIA+ couples at NFL stadiums like Arrowhead or most MLB stadiums. It’s less true for men’s soccer stadiums, but there has been fights to rid supporters groups of homophobic chants for years now.

At CPKC Stadium, and for fan groups around the NWSL who have staked out the league as the space for LGBTQIA+ fans to embrace, and be embraced.

Now, as we embark on the 2026 season, we have to ask, is the NWSL and the Kansas City Current in particular a target for ICE?

This is not a paranoid, nonsense question. Last year, we saw Mexican fans of Nashville FC, “We Are Not All Here.” after they were targeted by ICE.

We live in a political environment where Palantir-built facial recognition technology employed by ICE captures the identities of protesters, and label them as Domestic Terrorists. This is very likely why Jonathan Ross had a gun in one hand and his phone in another when he shot Renėe Good.

Do Kansas City Current fans have to worry that ICE will be present outside the stadium on game days? Will ownership declare CPKC Stadium and “Fourth Amendment” business and not allow ICE to enter without a proper judicial warrant?

Again, this is not a paranoid question. This is also a source for conflict over the club’s identity. The stadium is a contested space for what the Kansas City Current means.

Even though the Longs and the Mahomes built and own the stadium, and we should celebrate the investment and the transformation of the Riverfront—even if one of our owners is openly MAGA and gets shout-outs from Donald Trump.

But, last year, a Current game occurred on the day of a No Kings protest, and Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe activated the Missouri National Guard “As Precautionary Measure in Response to Unrest.” There was a real question about what to do if ICE or the Missouri National Guard appeared in the River Market: Would you decide not to attend a soccer game for fear of political violence and possibly being arrested and disappeared to a warehouse concentration camp?

This essays focuses on the LGBTQIA+ side of things because of Renee Good, but you could do an entire other essay on the tension between ownership and Black fandom: The seeming attempt to create the Current as an upscale sports lifestyle brand for white folks. This essay is already way, way too long, but to take a recent example, ownership apparently approved of naming Current Landing’s first nightclub “Sundown.”

In the State of Missouri. With its history. During the Second Trump Administration. While the team also decided not to honor Juneteenth this season, after doing so last season.

“Sundown Hi-Fi” touted that it’s Black-owned while being melanin-free in this and the rest of the mockups.

The Blue Crew supporters group made their statement, and soon enough, the Palmer Square Real Estate withdrew the project. Casio McCombs called the criticism “a difficult contradiction to sit with”…..but so would requiring a radically inclusive fanbase trying to enjoy a public space next to their stadium, shadowed by a nightclub explicitly calling back to the violent racist history of this state—at a time when ICE has specifically targeted sporting events for raids.

Were we really going to ask one of the best soccer podcasters and Kansas City Current beat reporter for Shea Butter FC, the inimitable Thombomb, to have to walk by Sundown Hi Fi on the way to work—doing the best live-post commentary in soccer and reporting for The Current Moment podcast?

I mean, is a nightclub in a billion-dollar real estate development really the place for the political project of “reclaiming” racist language from a past that, especially in the time of an explicit white nationalist movement, isn’t really past?

And if you don’t think the politics of all this lie just below the surface, reliable right-wing dog-whistle rag The Daily Mail attacked the KC Blue Crew by just saying the quiet part out loud, using the same coded language and visual cues right-wing media used in the demonization of Renee and Becca Good. The headline says it all:

The Kansas City Current Will Always Be About This Political Moment

For those of us with friends and family in Minneapolis, who have learned from them and prepared to resist ICE in our schools and neighborhoods, felt the horror and anger of a rising fascist movement in our midst, it was the winter of despair. That what you saw in Minneapolis can come for anybody, anywhere in this country—but it is targeted at cities and neighborhoods that didn’t vote for Trump’s bigotry.

To see the murders captured so blatantly on film, disseminated across the world, then have the basic facts double-thinked by the authorities into a defense of Big Brother. To see Renėe called a “fucking bitch” right after her wife, yes, talked shit to the agent, but then they simply tried to drive away and didn’t make it.

Then to find out that, not so long ago, they lived here in my neighborhood. They cheered for my team, likely because it represented the same thing that I love about my team.

As said by Katelyn Burns, her “queerness isn’t an aside–it’s a key part of her story.” When you think about who defines NWSL fandom, what gives it a unique identity as a queer-friendly sports space, it’s people exactly like Renėe and Becca Good.

At the third No Kings rally, Jane Fonda read a statement from Becca, saying that she and Renėe stand for “radical kindness,” and in a gesture of genuinely radical kindness, Becca says that she and her wife believe that fostering radical kindness is the belief that we can admit mistakes, that we are allowed to change our minds, “that what we believed before is not what we believe anymore.” That to “change your mind is powerful and beautiful and brave.”

Becca Good is inviting people who, before Renėe was murdered, might not have fully accepted she and her wife, but were moved by the video to understand that it was wrong and why it was wrong—she understands that it takes courage to cross over to the other side, and we will love you for it. The speech is not only moving, but an impressive pieces of rhetoric, and very much worth watching in full, about five minutes. You find out that the dog is ok.

Coming out of the winter of ICE and back into another season, for me, Renėe and Becca and all the radically kind fans is the Kansas City Current. The identity tied up in the Current is the same reason why the fascists continue to justify her murder. This may not be true for everyone who wears teal, but for me, the point of Kansas City Current fandom in this moment is to continue to make sure our stadium is safe for everybody who wants to make memories and celebrate being together.

In Today’s Political Environment, The Supporters Section at CPKC Stadium Is a Political Space

The Meaning Is In the Poetry

As I’ve learned from Roger Bennett, the poetry of memory is the best way to understand what it all means.

Renėe won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” It’s a piece about her memory of dissecting a pig in school: The theme is dissection itself, reducing living things to merely experiments by slicing them open, analyzing and classifying their component parts, ultimately cutting the life out of them, literally and figuratively. The fetal pig is no longer a living being that walked on this earth, but

Life is merely

To ovum and sperm

And where those two meet

And how often and how well

And what dies there.

When we dissect the pig solely to analyze where life begins, what dies there is our humanity, our respect for life:

It’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit,

This scientificalization of life dehumanizes us, slicing and dicing literal lives into material components to be analyzed–-dissected for meaning, as if analyzing component parts of the living being are more meaningful than the life itself. Life becomes less than the sum of its parts. Instead of enlarging our sensibility, we numb ourselves to it.

The fetal pig becomes a test to be graded, rather than a life lived. The video of an ICE officer, shooting his gun in one hand while holding his phone to enter data into a Palantir facial recognition app in the other, is reduced to a frame-by-frame analysis to distort reality and devalue the life that was lost and the others that were ruined in that moment.

In a vastly smaller but similar way, in our soccer fandom it’s how VAR’s frame-by-frame analysis distorts the play rather than clarifies, until we no longer understand what a handball even is. So, when the ball hits the net, our celebrations are ephemeral—we are celebrating everything and nothing, lest the Zapruder-film analysis captures just the right angle to make us question what we just saw. The forensics of “how” is paramount; the “objective” analysis obscures the truth and sucks the life out of the game. The humanity of celebration is devalued, and we’re left with the lesser moment when the “analysis” confirms “reality.”

At its best, soccer fandom is a celebration that we’re all here together, with the people we love, without distinction, in this unique space making memories while the most remarkable women athletes in the world do wondrous things.

Or, as Renėe’s poem says about bibles she donated to thrift stores, and other holy books she’s read, they tell us one thing:

“Make Room for Wonder”

May her memory be both a blessing and a call to vigilance to protect the spaces that are important to our community. Let us continue to enlarge our sensibility to make room for wonder.

The Author Celebrating All the Trans People in My Life and Beyond, Let Us Keep Fighting So We May Continue to Gather at CPKC Stadium.

“Rebels” With A Cause: Thomas Carlyle and Curtis Yarvin, Reactionary Monarchists Who Believed They Were Outcasts Because They Spoke Truth to Woke Power, When Actually They Just Costumed Gutter Racism in Intellectual Prose. Also, Whined About Being “Cancelled” Even Though They Never Shut Up and Influenced The Most Powerful People In Culture and Government.

A Tale of Two Cities is the Great Novel for our times, not just because all modern politics is fallout from the collapse of feudalism, symbolized by the Fall of the Bastille.

There is a clear, self-acknowledged lineage from the “House Philosopher” of today’s Techno-Fascist MAGA Movement, Curtis Yarvin, to his intellectual idol Thomas Carlyle, the most influential British philosopher of the 19th Century and the key source for Charles Dickens’ historical fiction of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities.

In his 94-page essay on Thomas Carlyle, Curtis Yarvin plainly states:

I am a Carlylean. I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice a a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist. And it is not too late for you to join us yourself! It’s a big tent, this cult of Carlyle.

Charles Dickens would count himself in this cult of Carlyle as well—but, and this is what makes A Tale of Two Cities so fascinating—Dickens might have worshipped at the Church of Carlyle, but his actual beliefs were quite different. To begin with Carlyle was an atheist, whereas Dickens was quite religious and is most famous for, more or less, inventing Modern Christmas. But more to the point, Carlyle and Dickens had very different views about history—not about what happened, but more about the idea of “history” itself.

Dickens began as a journalist, he never stopped doing journalism, and his habits and methods were that of a journalist. Dickens famously walked the London streets 20 miles a time, hung out in pubs (there are at least a dozen pubs still today that tout “Dickens Was Here”), and would visit prisons, ragged schools, slums—wherever there was a story, Dickens went there, with his notebook, and turned the lives of people into characters. Whatever else we can say about Dickens, he was interested in people. In fact, Charles Dickens’ first published work was Sketches by Boz, a collection of 56 short bits on London scenes and people, written under the pen name “Boz,” which earned him enough clout to begin work on The Pickwick Papers.

Thomas Carlyle, the “Sage of Chelsea",” didn’t really care about people. He was a polymath who inhabited the Life of the Mind. We will talk about him much more later, but Carlyle really didn’t think about, or care for, everyday people. This disposition led him to his most enduring idea: Carlyle’s reaction to the social upheavals caused by the European Potato Famine and the “Hungry 40s” was the Great Man Theory of History, in which history is “made” by the inherently superior men who are unafraid to use overwhelming violence to Restore Order.

The revolutionary period of the 1700-1800’s spawned Liberal Democracy and various forms of Socialism, whose conflicts with Reactionary Conservative Monarchical Dynasties led to Europe’s collapse during World War I. Thus, the Great Hero Who Restores Order became the philosophical underpinning of Nazi politics: According to Goebbels’ diary, in Hitler’s final hours in the Fuhrerbunker, he took comfort in reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great, which convinced Hitler that he was, indeed, a Great Man of History Restoring Order for the Master Race.

Carlyle’s status as the Nazis’ intellectual godfather is how Yarvin connects the English, American, and French Revolutions to Fascism to MAGA. Yarvin has written that Hitler was a “genius” (but, to be fair, he endorses Hitler’s ideas but not necessarily his methods and aesthetics), then brings that past into the present.

You don’t need to “read into” Yarvin’s writings to connect the Nazis to what ICE is doing in Minnesota: In late December 2025, Yarvin said that “Hitler Spoke The Truth to Germans” and that “all serious historians agree” that Hitler was a “genius,” which justifies self-proclaimed Hitler admirer, Holocaust denier, and Donald Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes’ call to ethnically cleanse Minnesota of its Somali population.

How MAGA “Thinks” Begins With Dickens’ Source for the French Revolution

So, yes, if you want to understand how MAGA thinks, you have to understand Curtis Yarvin, who “has shaped J.D. Vance’s thinking more” than anyone. And to understand Yarvin, in Yarvin’s own words, then you need to understand Thomas Carlyle’s study of the French Revolution. Much of Yarvin’s thinking evolves from his analysis of the French Revolution, which, in Yarvin’s mind, resulted from Enlightenment French intellectuals getting brain poisoned by the American and English revolutionaries’ revolt against their rightful kings.

Thomas Carlyle was also Charles Dickens’ major literary and intellectual influence, and hisThe French Revolution: A History is Dickens’ is chief source material for A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens and Carlyle were so close that the famously curmudgeonly Carlyle was so impressed by A Christmas Carol that, upon reading it, he immediately went out and bought a turkey. In fact, Dickens’ portrayal of celebratory feasts in A Christmas Carol grew directly from the economic exploitation of the Industrial Revolution and the Hungry 40s: “How Victorians’ Fear of Starvation Created Our Christmas Lore.”

So, when Dickens decided to write an historical fiction of the French Revolution, he asked Carlyle, who founded the London Library with books from his personal collection, for sources. According to Dickens, Carlyle sent “two cartloads of books” to his house–and though there’s a bit of legend here, Carlyle’s influence on A Tale of Two Cities and, thus, the popular memory of the French Revolution, is profound.

But Dickens’ book isn’t just Carlyle’s philosophy in an historical fiction. Rather, the brilliance of Cities is that Dickens begins with Carlyle’s narrative and fashions something entirely his own, and in many ways, deeply contradictory to the thinking of Carlyle: A deep meditation on what it means to be a Christian in a time of state terror.

Dickens opens Cities with the most famous line in literature: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” We will deep dive into this paragraph, but for now, understand that Dickens is saying: No matter how extraordinary the time in which you live–whether 1789, 1859, or 2026–it’s always been like this! In one of Cities’ most literary passages, Dickens describes the boots headed to the Bastille as echoing from Paris to London, and from aristocrats’ crimes in the past to the revolutionaries’ revolt in the present, the repercussions of which we experience in our time and space, which then echoes on to other times in other places.

And so it is with Curtis Yarvin and the philosophy of MAGA: Curtis Yarvin traces his philosophy from the English, American, and French revolutions, idolizing Carlyle as the antidote to all this rabble, then follows the path through Fascism right up to MAGA and the need to ethnically cleanse Somalis from Minnesota.

All of this is why A Tale of Two Cities is the Great Novel to read during the Second Trump Administration: It helps us understand how we got here, what’s happening now, and what we can do about it.

The “Wonderful Corner for Echoes” in Bedford Square, London That Inspired Dickens’ Metaphor for History During the “Storming of the Bastille” Chapter in A Tale of Two Cities.

Who Is Curtis Yarvin?

An intensely boring, predictable pseudo-intellectual, a partially homeschooled student who was told he had a High IQ, which gave him a pathologically overinflated sense of his own intelligence, turning him into one of those reflexively contrarian man-boys who provokes the sheeple who haven’t read, and anyway wouldn’t understand, Thomas Carlyle and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

You will be shocked to discover that Yarvin’s father was overbearing, his childhood “seems to have left him a lifelong feeling of inadequacy,” and he likes to burnish contrarian bonafides by talking about his Jewish Communist grandparents from Brooklyn rather than his WASP grandparents from Tarrytown. The High Priest of the Far Right lives in Berkeley after having bought a condo in Haight-Ashbury.

So, yes, he’s a self-styled Edgelord who literally created the “Red Pill” meme on his Mencius Moldbug blog. Long story short, he went to Silicon Valley, made some money as a successful software designer, started a “self-directed study of computer science and political theory” (literally doing his own research), and then wrote neo-Monarchist blogposts that caught the attention of Peter Thiel-sphere tech guys and far-right agitators.

Having spent a lot of time reading and reading about Curtis Yarvin, I can report: He is not very interesting, and virtually none of his work holds up to serious scrutiny. But if you want more, his “Unqualified Reservations by Mencius Moldbug” blog is the primary source, and the definitive Yarvin biographical essay is this Ava Kofman New Yorker piece.

Curtis Yarvin Believes That He Is Giving You The Red Pill By Intellectualizing Racism, But He Really Red-Pilled Himself By Internalizing the Only Praise He Got as a Child: Having a High IQ.

What Does Yarvin Believe?

As far as I can tell, there are three pillars of Yarvin’s “philosophy,” if you can call it that:

Hereditary Monarchy, Scientific Racism, and the Technological Republic.

If you think of these three strands interwoven, like a triple helix, this gets you really close to what’s happening in the Second Trump Administration. It can be hard to follow Yarvin’s meandering, try-hard ahistorical thoughts: Just know that Curtis Yarvin likes to say things like, “Napoleon was a start-up guy,” and that, mostly, he told Silicon Valley Tech Lords, Far-Right Racists, and Incel College Republicans what they wanted to hear.

The Three Pillars of Yarvin: The Monarchy and Aristocratic Court of the Sun King Louis XIV, the Scientific Racism and Colonial Defense of Thomas Carlyle, and the Technological Surveillance State of Peter Thiel.

Hereditary Monarchy

Curtis Yarvin is, at his core, a biological supremacist. He talks a lot about “biological roots of intelligence,” which has influenced J.D. Vance. Translated into an historical analysis, this means, of course, there is a “natural” aristocracy that should be headed by a hereditary monarch. Yarvin’s favorite monarch is Louis XIV, France’s “Sun King” who consolidated the realms of Gaul, creating Versailles as both a literal palace for, and the idea of, a ruling elite. Louis XIV’s governing philosophy is contained in the famous “L’état, c’est moi”: “I am the state.” To Yarvin, in news that would startle the 98% of France who weren’t aristocrats during the 1700s, an absolute monarch would be a benevolent ruler because “ransacking the state holds no meaning because it’s all his anyway.”

Thus, Yarvin believes that the English, American, and French Revolutions were illegitimate. He refers to himself as a “Jacobite,” the self-styled term for restorationists of the Stuart Monarchy of 1603. Why? According Austrian School economist of the Far Right Hans-Hermann Hoppe:

Essentially, revolutions act like cults; they delegitimize everything outside of them. The idea that we live in a kind of cult of the present that delegitimizes the past was somewhat new to me. And when you’re in a cult, it feels like the rest of the world is in a cult.

This is an interesting take, considering that Hoppe and Yarvin are famous today mostly because of the influence of a tiny cabal of Silicon Valley tech billionaires. But, to be fair, Yarvin’s take is also influenced by Thomas Carlyle, who absolutely describes the French Revolution as an insane and dehumanized cult—which is also conveyed by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, though, as we will discuss, Dickens has a much more nuanced take on the situation.

Scientific Racism

All these Far Right guys are IQ-obsessed, genes-determinists who want to legitimize their gutter racism with “science.” Curtis Yarvin was just the smartest-sounding one to publish it on a blog during the Tea Party era anti-Obama backlash.

If you want specifics, this account of his interview with New Labour former communications chair and podcaster Alastair Campbell from the 2024 Let the Light In London Conference is a great shorthand. Here, Curtis Yarvin talks about his “satirical” Mencius Moldbug essay “Race: A Modest Proposal,” modelled on the famous Jonathan Swift satire. Yarvin proposes mandatory DNA tests before filling out the census, that kind of thing.

I put “satire” in quotations because it’s clear that Yarvin isn’t really kidding. He believes deeply in hereditary aristocracy headed by a hereditary monarch. When you combine this with his well-documented love of using the n-slur, this represents his true beliefs:

Race, of course, is hereditary by definition… Transferable titles of hereditary nobility will end up in the hands of those most capable – a reality confirmed again and again by 21st Century science.

This excerpt from Ava Kofman’s New Yorker profile tells us what he said, on the record, about “ghetto Blacks,” which represents most of what you read on Mencius Moldbug:

I’d been pressing him on how he would define success in the second Trump Administration. Answering himself, he said that the “obvious solution” to problems of inner-city drug abuse and poverty would be to “put the church Blacks in charge of the ghetto Blacks.”

And:

“Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded.

If I were being ungenerous, I would say that Yarvin’s “Race: A Modest Proposal” is a direct rip-off of…Thomas Carlyle’s “satirical” piece “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” which originally used the Hard-R, and is definitely one of the most racist essays from the very racist Victorian era. Carlyle wrote this fake interview with “Phelin M’Quirk” to provoke debate with his intellectual rival John Stuart Mill, where he hides behind the satire facade to argue that obviously unintelligent and weird looking Black people should be enslaved in the West Indies to improve their condition, conditions on slave ships were exaggerated, and on and on.

As we will talk about, Carlyle’s supposed “satire” turned out to be…exactly what he thinks, which he exposed as chair of the Eyre Defence Fund, an organization that raised money to defend Governor Edward John Eyre’s declaration of martial law in the Morant Bay Rebellion, resulting in a charge of “mass murder” for the slaughter and systematic execution of over 400 Black men and women in Jamaica after the abolition of slavery.

(By the way, Dickens also supported Eyre. We will get to all that).

As with his idol Carlyle, it seems obvious that Yarvin hid his real thoughts behind a satire that he knew was unpalatable. But that was 2010, today he’s saying it out in the open:

Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find “a humane alternative to genocide,” an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma.”

And, wouldn’t you know it, in his defense of colonialism at the Let the Light In London Conference, Yarvin cites…Governor Eyre as a “good ruler.” “The Third World is a world crying out to be ruled,” he says, mock-proposing a more “efficient” way of doing Apartheid in South Africa: Disenfranchising anyone with an IQ of “less than 120.”

Or, to cross the strands of Hereditary Monarchy and Scientific Racism:

Since racial equality is a myth, democracy cannot work: ‘If negroes are unsuited for representative government, the fault lies entirely with the latter…’

The Morant Bay Rebellion by William Heysham Overend (1865), and Curtis Yarvin Telling Alastair Campbell That Governor Eyre Maybe Didn’t Go Far Enough (2024).

The Technological Republic

So, if you have a hereditary monarchy that rules over the genetic inferiors, how do you keep everybody in their proper place?

The Technological Surveillance State. Or, as Palantir CEO and confirmed techno-fascist Alexander Karp titled his Yarvin-inspired book, The Technological Republic.

This is where Yarvin brings Carlylean thought into the internet age.

Luke Munn’s article in The Conversation is a succinct, precise description of how Curtis Yarvin imagined the “Technological Fascism” of the Second Trump Administration. It is worth reading in full.

Back in 2012, Curtis Yarvin created a blueprint for “How to Reboot the US Government.” First, retire or fire as many government employees as you can, except for the police and military. Seize government funds and direct them toward the surveillance and police state, Defund universities and all scientific research. Ignore the courts, and co-opt if not outright purchase press outlets. Then, shut down elections because “Democracy was beta tested and failed to deliver.” Now, “The political operating system must be ripped out and replaced.”

Yes, you read that right: Curtis Yarvin proposed something like DOGE during the first Obama term.

What do you replace the “operating system of democracy” with?

The “Technological Republic.”

Hugely influenced by Yarvin during the Mencius Moldbug days, Karp argues that an efficient, well-run republic should do away with elections, and be based on “a founder culture that came from tech.” Or, as Yarvin puts it, “A government is just a corporation that owns a country.” Or, as the DOGEfather Elon Musk put it, “the government is simply the largest corporation.”

Curtis Yarvin Wrote the Blue Print for This in 2012

Once you rid the republic of democracy, instead of a king, the elites appoint the country’s CEO. The CEO would dismantle what Yarvin calls “The Cathedral”: all the education, humanitarian, religious, journalism, academic, and other “woke” institutions that promote such niceties as civil rights, equal opportunity, that stuff.

This opens up the space for the fascistic Technological Republic: Merge tech firms in the new government structure to conduct mass surveillance, replace workers with AI–basically turn the entire society into the Digital Panopticon where our betters watch over the plebes to ensure the smooth administration of society.

So, all of the OpenAI, Palantir, Elon Musk’s companies–all of these Silicon Valley data farming, collection, and analysis companies are part of the plan. This is how you actually administer a Thomas Carlyle-inspired hereditary monarchy based on scientific racism in the sprawling digital age: Terror through technology

All of this is what Curtis Yarvin imagined in his Mencius Moldbug blog while Trump was still a registered Democrat. All of this Techno-Fascist MAGA Movement of the Second Trump Administration draws primarily from the philosophy of Thomas Carlyle. Charles Dickens’ primary influence in writing A Tale of Two Cities is Thomas Carlyle, and it’s Charles Dickens who, as we will talk about, contemplates the “cult of Revolution,” the “fear of the uncontrollable masses,” the beginnings of the surveillance state, the first use of state terror explicitly as a political tactic, and how technological change collapsed one form of government and ushered in the next.

Above: “The Grindstone” by Fred Barnard (1874), Illustration for the Household Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Below: Palantir CEO Alexander Karp Explaining How the Technological Republic Would Restore Order Through a Digital Version of the Panopticon, Like the Presidio Modelo That Once Held Communist Revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Dickens Would Say That the Best of Times and the Worst of Times Happened Before, Are Here, and Will Come Again

This is not to say that the Yarvin/Thiel/Vance/Trump Techno-Fascist Terror State is an inevitability. In fact, Charles Dickens has something to say about that, which offers an alternative to Carlyle’s proto-fascism. This very image of the turning of the grindstone is how Dickens explains why this will all, eventually, collapse–because it always does, and comes back around again. He gives us a way to think about living through The Worst of Times that is well worth reading in our time. Really, Yarvin himself seems to believe that Dickens’ conclusion will win out in the end, with a sentiment that mirrors Dickens’ philosophy of human nature:

“Unless we can totally reëngineer DNA to change what a human being is, there are many people who should not live in a modern way but in a traditional way,” he concluded. “And that is a level of revolution that is so far beyond anything the Trump-Vance regime is doing.”

Why? Yarvin quotes the French Revolution’s Archangel of Terror, Louis de Saint-Just, who championed the Reign of Terror and makes a brief unnamed appearance in A Tale of Two Cities:

“He who makes half a revolution digs his own grave.”

Louis de Saint Just and Robespierre at the Hotel de Ville, Jean-Joseph Weerts (1897), Depicting the Two Architects of the Reign of Terror The Night Before They Were Guillotined by the Thermidorian Reaction, Which Attempted to Restore Order to the Chaotic Republic.

Curtis Yarvin, If You Asked Him How to Deal With Revolutionaries: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that guillotines–for lack of a better word–are good. Guillotines are right. Guillotines work. Guillotines clarify, cut through, and capture the essence of the revolutionary spirit.”

The Author From Deep Within the Stacks London Library, Founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, Author of The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens’ Primary Source for A Tale of Two Cities.

What Is History, Exactly?

Historiography is the study of how we come to understand history. Said another way: It’s the study of the methodology that creates both the historical record and our analysis of that record.

Or, the history of history.

Historiography isn’t merely an academic exercise. History is the stories that shape society, in large part to justify The Way Things Ought To Be. These stories are foundational not just for abstract political ideas, but in the concrete ways the law is written and executed, how policymakers decide who-gets-what, and how people relate to one another.

This is why historiography matters: Who controls the history is, mostly, who controls the material conditions of the present and the future.

For our present moment, the historiography of the French Revolution is the most important historiography to understand–even for Americans, more important than the civic mythologies of the Founding Fathers, the Civil War and World War II.

So, why choose the French Revolution as Year One?

Because this is when Enlightenment ideas were put into practice, tearing down the feudal system and ushering in the modern world’s three major political movements: Liberal Democracy, Socialism and Communism, and Fascism.

The arc of the modern world begins with the Storming of the Bastille, which eventually gave rise to Napoleon, who emerged from the rubble of the Revolution as the world’s first nationalist dictator. Napoleon’s mission was to Make France Great Again, creating a model for “enlightened despots” whose fear campaigns are drawn from tropes lifted directly from the streets of Paris during the Revolution.

This is also why A Tale of Two Cities is the classical work of fiction for our time. Charles Dickens’ chief source for A Tale of Two Cities is Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History, which lionized Napoleon for his willingness to fire cannons at a street revolt in 1795 Paris. Carlyle wrote that Bonaparte quelled the uprising with a “Whiff of Grapeshot,” where “the thing we specifically call French Revolution is blown into space by it.”

From here, Carlyle would go on to write On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, whose thesis is “Great Men should rule and that others should revere them.” Carlyle invented the “Great Man” Theory of History that is widely, and controversially, the basis for much of the teaching of history in American schools. For reasons that should be obvious, he is regarded by “People’s History” advocates as the intellectual founding father of Fascism—so much so that Goebbels’ diary says that he and Hitler were reading Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great in the Führerbunker.

From here, Thomas Carlyle

Corporal Bonaparte Ordered a Whiff of Grapeshot in the Streets of Paris, Which Thomas Carlyle Interpreted as Just a Great Man Doing a Great Thing for the Nation.

“Bonaparte Orders to Shoot at the Section Members” by Yan Dargent (1866), Which Appears in Adolphe Theirs’ Histoire de la Revolution—Published Five Years Before President Thiers’ Ordered the Army of the Third French Republic to Fire on His Fellow Frenchmen to Destroy the Paris Commune During The Bloody Week.

Lenin Literally Took Notes and Put This Theory into Practice During the Bolsheviks’ October Revolution and Won the Russian Revolution. Since the Whiff of Grapeshot, Every Dictator Raises the Specter the French Revolution to Justify Firing on Protesters in the Streets For the Good of the Nation.

What Sparked the French Revolution?

In May 1787, Royal Finance Minister Charles Alexandre de Calonne told the Assembly of Notables, the congress of high-ranking nobles and clergy, that King Louis XVI’s monarchy was so broke that major tax reform was necessary to keep France solvent. The Assembly couldn’t agree on a fix, so they called the Estates General, the “estates of the realm,” to consider reforms. In other words, the Enlightened nobles told the King that to raise revenue, he needed the consent of the people.

As discussed by Thomas Piketty’s hugely influential 2014 book (which grew out of the 2008 financial collapse), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 1789 France suffered some of the worst wealth inequality in history: The top 10% held 90% of the kingdom’s wealth, and of that, the top 1% held about 60%.

Why? Louis XVI’s predecessors consolidated the realms of France by, mostly, exempting land-owning nobles and the Catholic Church from property taxes, leaving the vast majority of people with the smallest amount of wealth to finance the monarchy.

So, to satisfy the bankers, Louis XVI needed the assent of his subjects to levy new taxes. But when the Estates General wouldn’t ratify the King’s proposals, he locked the Third Estate (representing everyone but the nobles and clergy) out of the convention, triggering a revolt that resulted in the Tennis Court Oath, when representatives from all the Estates swore not to separate until Louis consented to a Constitutional regime.

From this moment, the feudal system started to dismantle slowly, then sometimes all at once, in kingdom after kingdom across Europe for the next two centuries. In its place rose different types of governments, the major movements being Democracy, Communism, and Fascism. These are, roughly, the same major movements that dominate today.

There’s an often misattributed 1972 quotation by Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai from a conversation with an American diplomat who asked, “What has been the impact of the French Revolution?” To which Enlai replied, “It’s too early to say.”

This is either wholly apocryphal, or more likely, a mistranslation about the 1968 student uprising in Paris.

Either way, it feels true because it is impossible to understand these three political movements without understanding the French Revolution. All of their various revolutionaries created and implemented their ideas based on their analysis of what began in 1787 Paris. Mostly, they looked at the same set of facts and drew wildly different conclusions–both infused by their contemporary politics, but also by developing their contemporary politics based on their historical analysis.

This is why the French Revolution’s historiography matters: Today’s historical actors are still acting in the traditions established by those who literally interpreted the French Revolution–then went out and changed the world based on their historical analysis.

Do you think the fall of the American Republic might be predicated on our enormous wealth inequality that’s the result of exempting the ultra-rich from paying their fair share of taxes?

That’s French Revolution stuff.

Do you think the specter of radical left-wing street violence so haunts reactionary centrists and conservatives that they would go to war with their own countrymen rather than institute wide-scale social reforms?

That’s French Revolution stuff.

And on and on. Once you study the French Revolution, you begin to see it everywhere in our politics.

A Rabble of Hungry Peasants Storm a French Prison Right Before Their Rent Is Due, and 156 Years Later, These Guys End Up at Some Crimean Resort Trying to Figure Out How to Defeat Hitler and Emperor Hirohito (Unknown Photographer; Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin at the Yalta Conference, 1945).

This Approach to the Historiography

The French Revolution is the most contested historiographical space, so we won’t cover close to all of it. Mostly, we will trace the development of Democracy, Communism, and Fascism from their French Revolution roots, with a narrow focus on the most important writers and historical actors. You may be surprised by how many names and ideas you already know.

Along the way, we will explain why certain historical sources and authors are important to A Tale of Two Cities, mostly confined to the final section on Thomas Carlyle and the philosophical underpinnings of Fascism. Armed with this historical knowledge, as we read A Tale of Two Cities, we will be able to understand:

1) How Dickens analyzed the causes of the Revolution,

2) How this understanding flows from Dickens’ view of human nature,

3) How this view of human nature informs his individual theory of history,

3) How Dickens’ Christianity flows from these views on human nature and history,

4) How these ideas can help us grapple with our current political moment, and

5) How to think deeply about all of it….because Dickens accomplishes, through fiction, what is beyond the scope of historians, philosophers, and politicians.

French Revolution Primary Sources

The French Revolution’s primary sources are, at once, very vast but with significant holes in the historical record. There are troves of open-access collections: My go-to is the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University’s Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, a free, curated, and peer-reviewed site supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In written form, most primary sources are: 1) official government documents, 2) transcripts of speeches at national assemblies, 3) transcripts or reports of speeches given at political clubs, 4) journalism and pamphlets, 5) paintings and illustrations, 6) personal notes and diaries from famous figures, 7) letters written by eyewitnesses, and 8) maps that show the movement of events.

As for tangible objects, dozens of museums house French Revolution artifacts: In Paris, the main sources are the Musée Histoire de Paris Carnavalet, which recently underwent a four-year renovation to create an entire permanent exhibition of primary sources from the Revolutionary Era, from the Estates General to Fall of King Louis-Philippe during the Revolution of 1848. And the Panthéon, Paris’ monument to the Republic, where not only are the Republic’s heroes buried–but more importantly, its artwork conveys the mythology of the Republic.

Aside from the major museums, you can find interesting primary sources at small, niche places like the Musée de la préfecture de police (The Paris Police Museum). Below are my pictures of a restored National Guard uniform from the Revolutionary Era, an original peace-keeping order from the 1789, and a guillotine.

Sorry Everybody, It’s Only a Model Guillotine.

The Hole in the Primary Source Record: The Literal Voice of the Sans-Culottes and the Rural Peasantry

For me, it’s the voice of rural peasants and the Sans-culottes, the poor working class of Paris who did not wear fancy knee breeches–in their own voice.

Plenty of sources describe what the urban poor and rural peasants did, and plenty of letters, notes, and artistic renderings that give impressions of who they were. But rarely do you hear them in their own voice.

What’s often called “The Voice of the Sans-culottes” is, mostly, from the pens of politicians who claimed to represent them. These were the “salon radicals”: The (mostly) lawyers whose politics claimed to support the poor, and often did. In fact, most of the written primary sources are from these educated leftists.

But as for the people they claimed to represent, we really just rely on others’ impressions.

Even a book from the Marxist press like The Permanent Guillotine: The Writings of the Sans-culottes is, in its own description, “an anthology of figures who express the will and wishes of this nascent revolutionary class.” There were some middle-class leaders in the Enragés, the political faction representing the Sans-culottes during the worst of the Regin of Terror, including, for example, the priest Jacques Roux. But even he was college educated.

This makes sense: Many of the urban poor and rural peasants were illiterate–and, because paper was taxed, the actual working poor didn’t have the means to create records of their condition. In a haunting passage from A Tale of Two Cities, we will see that the rural peasants destroyed written records of their feudal obligations: Dickens imagines the peasant uprisings of 1793, in which rural peasants set fire to aristocratic mansions across France, creating a chaotic apocalypse straight out of Paradise Lost.

Perhaps the best example of this reflection of the poor’s voice is Jacques Hébert’s journal Le Père Duchesne. Hébert was a Revolutionary extremist who had extraordinary influence during the worst of the Terror. He was a member of the Jacobin Club in its most radical form, the Cordeliers Club that met in the most radical area of working class Paris, sat on the Paris Commune, which is largely responsible for the Insurrection of August 10th, the September Massacres, the Purge of the Girondins, and the Reign of Terror.

This Guy Was Just Mad As Hell and Not Going To Take It Anymore.

Le Père Duchesne was a fictionalized character that “voiced” the anger of the Paris working class, casting the Sans-culottes as the patriotic soul of the Revolution. Though he did not invent Duchesne, Hébert used his character to voice both the desires and the idealization of the populist Enragés, through this hard-working, salt-of-the-earth stove repairman. The conceit is genius: Because stoves are a luxury item, Duchesne has access to the homes of the aristocrats, so he simply reports and opines on the eccentric extravagances and casual cruelty of nobility.

This excerpt is representative of most Duchesne articles: His foul-mouthed bluntness is simply how the workingman talks, as opposed to those hypocritical rich dandies who barely lift a finger but eat four meals a day. Duchesne works hard, goes home to his loving family and thankful dog, over dinner telling his kids to always be loyal to the Republic and to cheer the guillotining of all their political enemies as traitors.

This is where Dickens’ fiction really does contribute to our human understanding of the Revolution. Duchesne is obviously a propaganda cartoon, a proto-vision of the German Volk in Nazi propaganda. In contrast, Dickens’ main characters in Paris, the Defarges, are his composite pictures of the Sans-culottes, but drawn with a complex human dimension.

In Contrast, Dickens Concluded That These Ladies from St Antoine, the Poor Neighborhood Near the Bastille, Had a Plan and Knew How to Pull it Off. Saint Antoine by Fred Barnard, Composed for the Original Publication of A Tale of Two Cities.

The Defarges hold the Enragés’ politics that for the new nation to live, the aristocrats must die. In Dickens’ telling, the Aristocrats v. the Sans-culottes turns into a kind-of race war, each side refusing to see the other as human. Yet, Dickens draws the Defarges not as idealized cartoons, but as literate, skilled, and strategic community organizers. They employ sophisticated methods to coalesce support in the Parisian underground–they are effective underground organizers who exploit the horrors around them to foment a Revolution. They are skilled politicians, even if they are never represented in any assembly.`

In one memorable passage, Dickens imagines the Defarges as a quiet, homely married couple sitting on the porch, wondering about the future after they’re gone–here, wondering if the Revolution will ever come in their lifetime. Madame Defarge tells her husband, take comfort my love, the Revolution comes like an earthquake after years of shifting earth underground, and then it arrives suddenly to do its destructive work. They even hold secrets from each other, with Dickens skillfully creating a portrait of people who, on some level, know what they’re doing is wrong, but social and cultural conditions force them to do it anyway.

In this way, when the Reign of Terror comes, we see the Sans-culottes as blood thirsty demons, as George Orwell said of A Tale of Two Cities. But by drawing them as humans who fall into this devilry, Dickens explains how extreme poverty and extreme wealth dehumanizes: The aristocrats are inhuman to create such conditions, leading the poor to become dehumanized themselves, and so the whole Revolution becomes this Hell between warring demonic factions.

This is why Dickens fills a legitimate gap in the early historiography of the French Revolution: Unlike Hébert’s cartoons, Dickens imagines a more human internal portrait of the Sans-culottes. He uses his novelist and journalistic skills to conjure the psychology of the St Antoine neighborhood during the 1790s, apart from the political propaganda of the far-left salon radical class.

The Wine-shop by Fred Barnard for the Original Publication of A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens Thought it All Went Off the Rails, But at the Beginning, The Defarges Were Savvy Community Organizers Who Suffered No Fools.

Figuratively and Literally on the Left is Thomas Paine, Figuratively and Literally on the Right is Edmund Burke. Their Debates Over the French Revolution Created Today’s Political Left and Right.

The Great Democratic Debate of Constitutional Monarchy v. Republic: Edmund Burke v. Thomas Paine

Burke and Paine were not so much historians of the Revolution as actual participants. Edmund Burke was a legendary MP who deeply influenced Britain’s foreign policy towards Revolutionary France while the Reign of Terror was happening. Thomas Paine not only sparked the American Revolution with Common Sense, but later joined the French Revolution and ended up in a Paris prison during Terror, spared from the guillotine only by a clerical error inside the prison and was released in the general amnesty following the Thermidorian Reaction against Robespierre.

Their vicious, public debate about the French Revolution is, literally, where the political terms “Left” and “Right” come from. Inside the first French National Assembly after the Tennis Court Oath, the more radical, anti-monarchy members sat to the left of the President’s chair, and the more traditional members sat to the right. This physical description was used to shorthand the basic dispositions of Burke and Paine.

Edmund Burke is widely considered the Founding Father of Conservatism, Thomas Paine the Founding Father of Progressivism. So, yes, the fundamental dispositions of today’s politics is directly born out of contemporaneous analyses of the French Revolution. For more, I highly recommend the indomitable Stephen West’s Philosophize This! episode “Are You Left or Right?”

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke is still today a primary source for British Tories and American Republicans. He believed that virtue is the foundation for society, that institutions–religious, government, business, and otherwise–were necessary for the “moral stability” of the nation. So, for Burke, social change must be incremental, that radicalism is per se immoral and indefensible, no matter what ideals or material conditions the radicals advocate for.

To this end, Burke actually supported America’s grievances against King George III and Parliament, opposing the use of force in the colonies. Burke did not support American independence, but he did propose a resolution to allow the Americans to elect their own Parliamentary representatives and create a General American Assembly. Burke sympathized with the Americans because he saw British policy as incredibly disruptive to their established patterns of taxation and governance. The policy wasn’t conservative.

As for the French Revolution, Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was the defining intellectual argument against the Revolution–so much so that Louis XVI himself had it translated into French. Today, it’s regarded as the founding document of conservatism, arguing for traditionalism, in all its forms, as the political philosophy that facilitates national virtue:

Society is indeed a contract…but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee…to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence…It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection….it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Burke’s preferred governance is gradual reform under a Constitutional order based on traditional principles, held together by a king and administered by an aristocratic elite. Revolution in the name of “abstractions” like “liberty” and “rights” are too speculative, and so will be defined by the regime of the day to justify its inevitable tyranny. Only rights that are “inherited,” justified by “antient” constitutions and established by tradition, can form the basis of a virtuous nation.

Engraving (1851) of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s “The Club,” Where Edmund Burke (Front Center, Red Coat) and the Boys Agree That National Stability Is Only Protected When the King Asserts His Godly Command to Rule Over the Rabble.

Thomas Paine

Reflections sparked a “pamphlet war,” first with legendary feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of the future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley), who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke; Occasioned by His Reflections on the Revolution in France. Basically, she called Burke a sexist, aristocratic toady for the King and the Church of England. Wollstonecraft extended these arguments two years later in her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Second, Burke prompted a two-volume response by Mary Wollstonecraft’s acquaintance, who ran in the same intellectual circles as her future husband William Godwin, the Englishman turned American Thomas Paine. Yes, that Thomas Paine, whose The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution is one of the founding documents of modern progressivism.

Thomas Paine is most known to us as the author of Common Sense, which rallied American patriots to the revolutionary cause. But Paine is much more than that: Born and worked as an Excise Officer in England, he racked up debts, divorced his wife, somehow met Benjamin Franklin, who got him on a boat for Pennsylvania, where he wrote magazine articles denouncing slavery and advocating for an American republic, was dispatched to Paris to lobby for French funding of the American Revolution, moved back to England where he wrote Rights of Man, which got him indicted for seditious libel, prompting him to flee to Paris, where we was elected to the National Convention of the French Republic, got thrown in prison and nearly guillotined, met Napoleon (who claimed to sleep with a copy of Rights of Man), moved back to America and feuded with George Washington, dying in Greenwich Village in 1809, had his bones dug up to be given a hero’s burial back in England, and still today people claim to own pieces of his skull.

So, what did Paine write to Edmund Burke that got him indicted for seditious libel?

Primarily, that hereditary government is incompatible with individual liberty.

Burke argued that centering society on a monarch creates stability, with a small ruling class lording over the poor. For Burke, private property and lawful inheritance are the mechanisms of that stability: the ruling class bequeath their property and titles to their sons, who are trained in the art of good governance of the people. Thus, the wisdom of the ages is passed down through the educated class such that government itself is a “contrivance of human wisdom.”

Paine said this was a weak defense of feudalism, which was dying with the rise of Enlightenment ideals. As such, he dedicated Rights of Man to the great founders of the American and French Revolutions: George Washington, who refused to become emperor and willingly gave up power to establish the democratic republic; and Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, who renounced his aristocratic title in Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

To answer the Political Question, Paine argued that human rights originate in nature. They are not a benevolent gift bestowed by a divine monarch–nor are they granted by political charters, which implies that they can be revoked. That which comes from nature cannot be taken by man.

What does this mean for constitutions? Each citizen enters into a contract with each other to “produce a government,” which safeguards inalienable, natural rights. So, the only legitimate governments arise from the consent of the people from below, not monarchs from upon high. This requires the complete eradication of hereditary government and noble titles.

To answer the Social Question, Paine argues that poverty deprives you of individual liberty, so any government that allows crippling poverty undermines its own legitimacy. So, social welfare is a natural right, not charity–he harshly criticized England’s Poor Laws (the main target of Dickens), saying that any government that allows its citizens to suffer poverty violates their natural rights, not just because of the poverty, but through the infliction of workhouses, debtors prisons, and the death penalty.

Thus, Paine advocates for the redistribution of lands and wealth, as well as tax reform and public education. Of these, Paine agrees with Burke, saying that education is the most important, but for a completely different reason. Rather than hoarding education for a small ruling elite, Paine says that all citizens should learn the Enlightenment principles that make democracy possible, and that education is the means by which individual citizens escape the cycle of poverty that oppresses their natural right. Monarchs and titled nobles, he says, are incapable of carrying out such a program because education is what gives them power, land is what gives them serfs, inheritance hoards their wealth, and they will never institute the tax reform to provide the means of the social welfare that is everyone’s natural right.

So that’s why Rights of Man was seditious libel: Though Paine never outright says, “Overthrow King George III,” he “suggests” a written constitution deliberated by a far more democratic body than the British Parliament, the elimination of aristocratic titles, a progressive income tax that would break the feudal system, and replacing the Poor Law with subsidized public education.

Rights of Man was a political document for its times, with a whole bunch of specific proposals for the government, which, truth be told, do not completely add up. But its enduring legacy is as a defense of the French Revolution’s declaration of a republic, laying out a progressive vision of government to counter the conservative Burke.

Marie’s Crisis Cafe, Around the Corner From Stonewall in Greenwich Village, Today is a “Broadway Showtunes ‘Sing-Along’ Piano Bar.” It’s Built on the Site of Thomas Paine’s Last Home, Where He Died in 1809.

Behind the Bar is a WPA Mural of the American and French Revolutions, With an Homage to Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

As for Dickens, he will agree neither with Burke nor Paine because of his views on human nature. Dickens certainly does not believe in any sort of humane, enlightened monarchy or church. But neither does Dickens believe that institutionalized education or democratic governments will make things better. Dickens believes that human nature is evil: We are all born sinners, so whatever form of government you dream up is going to be corrupt because human beings are corrupt. This is key to understanding the turn of A Tale of Two Cities in the third act.

The Liberal, Democratic Reformers: François Mignet and Adolphe Thiers

These next two writers worked after the fall of Napoleon, during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy of King Louis-Philippe, France’s “bourgeois” monarchy that lasted from 1830-1848. They championed the “liberal nobles,” the enlightened aristocrats who understood the need for reform, some of whom like the Marquis de Lafayette, crossed the Atlantic to fight in the American Revolution.

François Mignet’s Histoire de la révolution française (1824) was the first comprehensive history available to the general public, selling an incredible 200,000 copies. Mignet was from the Vendée region along the Atlantic coast, a conservative royalist region that erupted in civil war during the Revolution and experienced the bloodiest of the Terror. So, Mignet’s analysis is that both the conservative royalists and the Jacobin republicans were too extreme. Thus, the liberal nobles who advocated for the Rights of Man, but without overthrowing the entire social order, were the enlightened men of France.

In Mignet’s telling, men like the Marquis de Lafayette are the heroes of the “First Revolution” of 1789, which enshrined rights in France’s political order. The “Second Revolution” of 1793 was led by the villains, where men like Georges Danton, Maximilian Robiespierre, the radicals of the Cordelier Club and the Enragé, attempted to overthrow the social order, descending France into the bloody chaos that Mignet’s father experienced in the Vendée.

Mignet didn’t advocate for a republic: he was a constitutional monarchist who used his stature as historian of the revolution to advocate for the Duke of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, to rule as “King of the French” after the fall of his absolutist Bourbon cousin Charles X in 1830.

Here’s where Mignet’s analysis of the French Revolution had a very real impact on world history: Mignet deeply influenced the man he worked alongside, Adolphe Thiers, who published his own 10 volume history of the French Revolution in the 1820s. This was a radical act for both Mignet and Thiers: They interpreted the French Revolution’s heroes as the liberal nobles, who staunchly opposed the absolutist Bourbons who were restored after the fall of Napoleon.

This bravery gave Mignet and Thiers political credibility during the Revolution of 1830. Mignet, mostly, stayed a historian until he died in 1884 at the age of 87. Thiers, though, embarked on a long, consequential political career that lasted through the July Monarchy (serving as Prime Minister twice), the Second Republic, the Second Empire, eventually becoming the President of France during the Third Republic in 1871.

A Paris Commune Pamphlet Reviving Jacques Hébert’s journal Le Père Duchesne, Depicting “Le Dictateur Thiers” Riding a Snail. The Communards and Thiers Both Understood Themselves as Acting as Direct Descendants From the First French Revolution.

When he held power, Thiers put his analysis of the original Revolution into practice: After Emperor Napoleon III was captured during the Franco-Prussian War, Thiers headed the Government of National Defense and was forced to negotiate a humiliating peace with Otto von Bismarck in the Palace of Versailles. After the National Assembly voted for the armistice, Thiers embarked for Paris, but the working classes of the city–who made up most of the National Guard–had radicalized into a socialist movement.

Long story short, Thiers chose to wage war against his own capital to stamp out the Paris Commune radicals looking to overturn the social order and create something entirely new. In this regard, Thiers’ legacy is The Bloody Week—and, important to world history, the Paris Commune was the last revolutionary uprising of Karl Marx’s time. Marx’s analysis of the Thiers and the Commune deeply influenced a young Vladimir Lenin, who would not make the same mistakes as the Commune when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

It’s fair to say that, in this moment, Thiers chose the violence that his liberal noble heroes of 1789 did not, that King Charles X in 1830 did not, that King Louis-Philippe in 1848 did not, and they all ended up in exile or guillotined. Thiers’ choice to crush the Paris Commune was deeply analyzed by Lenin in his study of the French Revolution, creating a roadmap for the Communists after the fall of Czar Nicholas I’s Russian Empire and the Provisional Government in 1917.

The Rue de Rivoli After the Bloody Week and the Fall of the Paris Commune (1871). Echoing Maximillian Robespierre’s Admonition “Did You Want a Revolution Without A Revolution?”, Adolphe Thiers Was Willing to Stop Another Reign of Terror By Doing a Reign of Terror. Lenin Took Notes.

The Bounds Between Democracy and Communism: François Guizot and Jules Michelet

Before we tackle the Marxists, we will backtrack to a man specifically namechecked in the very first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto, François Guizot. Similar to Thiers, François Guizot began professional life as a historian, parlaying his prominence into a long, consequential career in French politics, spanning the July Monarchy’s Revolution of 1830 to the Revolution of 1848 and the Second Republic.

Guizot was born in 1787, and during the Napoleonic Era, he became a writer and minor bureaucrat. During the Bourbon Restoration, Guizot was in and out of government, eventually settling into an appointment at the University of Paris. There, he published long treatises on representative government, focused less on France and more on Great Britain and its revolutions. In this, he originated the concept of the “History of Civilization,” the idea that, over time, nations create the institutions that are “necessary to uphold their emancipation.” Something like a theory of “total history.”

Guizot was a staunch institutionalist because, well, his father was guillotined during the Reign of Terror in 1794. Guizot is best described as a conservative-liberal: Absolutely opposed to the radicals who executed his father, but also of the opinion that absolutists, whether in the vein of the Jacobin Radicals or Napoleon Bonaparte or the Restored Bourbons, could never bring a nation stability because they provoked those same radicals. So, Guizot favored “a monarchy limited by a limited number of bourgeois.”

Long story short, Guizot’s philosophical underpinning made him popular with King Louis-Phillipe, but Guizot was too much of an academic to really understand practical politics or good governance. Ultimately, his Prime Ministership doomed the July Monarchy in 1848. Guizot was incapable of reform when, clearly, some compromise for expanding the vote for Parliamentary elections was necessary. Louis-Phillipe listened to Guizot for too long, and eventually the streets of Paris rose up in revolt. Guizot’s resignation caused much celebration, but it wasn’t enough.

Over the course of three days, blood was shed across the city, with revolutionary National Guards closing in on the Tuileries Palace. Adolphe Thiers advised the King to escape Paris, then lead columns of regular troops into Paris to crush the revolt. But Louis-Phillipe didn’t have the stomach to fire on his people and destroy this great city. He abdicated and fled to England. Twenty-three years later, Adolphe Thiers would prove that he did have the stomach for it.

Guizot, on the other hand, retired from public life and went back to writing. When he analyzed the rise of constitutional monarchy in England and republicanism in America in Discours sur l’histoire de la Revolution d’Angleterre, he found a people building institutions that would settle the peace and provide prosperity. To Guizot, France and Europe had not settled the History of Their Civilizations, which is why they lagged behind their English-speaking brethren.

In his analysis of the rolling series of French Revolutions, which guillotined his father and nearly strung him up in the streets, Guizot concluded that the toppling of French institutions, rather than reforming them, never gave France a firm enough foundation on which to build a great nation.

Guizot’s analysis is obviously self-exonerating, even if it might be persuasive. The truth is that he practiced government like an academic: the historian subsumed the statesman. He spent so much time and energy legitimizing the constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Phillipe that he didn’t develop the skill of practical government or an ear for politics.

In the end, Guizot so mishandled a simple non-crisis that it brought down the monarchy: Les Campagne de banquets. The Banquet Campaign was, really, a trolling exercise by the moderate liberals: Guizot’s cabinet became more authoritarian, aggressively enforcing the law prohibiting “public assemblies,” so liberals sponsored private dinners that properly toasted the King, but were really an excuse to organize and denounce the monarchy. Rather than relent one inch, Guizot called in the police and military to stop a Paris banquet from celebrating the international icon of democratic republicans, George Washington, triggering a riot that conflagrated beyond his ability to handle.

A minor figure during this era of academic and intellectual repression was Jules Michelet, the Chair of the History Department at the Collège de France. Michelet secured this position after working under the traditionalist historian…François Guizot, then part of the Literary Faculty at the College de France.

As an academic, Michelet was devoted to Enlightenment ideals–appropriating the old art criticism term “Renaissance” in his Histoire de France to describe the wholesale modernization from the Middle Ages, when mankind was “reborn.” He was a staunch republican whose work contributed to the radicalization of students that led to the Revolutions of 1848. In fact, the cancellation of his lectures on January 2nd, 1848 led to a large-scale student demonstration against King Louis-Philippe and Guizot, the momentum of which morphed into the Campagne de Banquets.

Michelet is the great democratic republican of the early French Revolution historiography, who today would be classified as a democratic socialist, becoming such a popular teacher that he triggered demonstrations against his stodgy former boss who wanted everybody to sit down and shut up.

François Guizot Accepts the Charter of Government From “Citizen-King” Louis-Philippe I (1830). The Foundation Wasn’t Deep Enough to Hold Up the House of Orlean, But Guizot Didn’t Do Much to Buttress the Supports. Marx and Engels Predicted as Much, and Wrote The Communist Manifesto.

Marx and Engels Saw That There Could Be No True Brotherhood Between The Members at the Country Club and Their Caddies, No Matter How Well You Tip.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

In 1848, only months before François Guizot triggered the collapse of France’s constitutional monarchy, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx declared that “the spectre of communism” is haunting “old Europe,” who have entered into a holy alliance to perform the exorcism. Guizot is right there, next to the Pope and Tsar.

Why?

Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution was that a peaceful and prosperous nation could only exist on a foundation of traditional institutions, governed by a monarch and the slimmest of democratic principles. More than that, and it’s guillotines and student riots and barricades in the streets.

Marx and Engels saw the French Revolution fundamentally differently: How can there be Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité when the wealth of the nation isn’t shared? How can we be free and equal brothers when my labor enriches the men of leisure, who profit off my sweat and blood?

“Marxism” is far too complicated to get into, and from here, I will just refer to writings by “Marx,” but we must acknowledge that Friedrich Engels was, really, his full partner. I will narrow this to Marx’s writings on the French Revolution, even though I really should include a section on French Socialist Louis Blanc, whose 12-volume history of the French Revolution lifts Gracchus Babeuf and The Conspiracy of Equals (we will talk about them below) up from historical obscurity. Blanc also first used the term “capitalism” in its modern context, as well developing the concept of “The Right to Work,” meaning that if a society requires you to work to live, then you have, well, a right to work. Blanc was able to put this theory into practice as part of the Provisional Government of 1848 after the fall of the July Monarchy with the creation of the National Workshops. In this, you can perhaps see a proto-version of the Works Progress Administration and the New Deal.

This discussion of Marx and his followers will be helpful because much of Dickens’ understanding of the French Revolution mirrors Marx’s, even if Dickens thought it was a literal apocalypse and Marx saw the beginnings of a glorious socialist future.

The best source for understanding the intellectual underpinnings of “Marxism” is from the “Revolutions” podcast and Mike Duncan’s The Three Pillars of Marxism episode. Or, as none other than Vladimir Lenin wrote in The Marxist Doctrine: Marx was a genius who synthesized the classical German philosophy of Hegel, the classical English political economy of Adam Smith, and “French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines” into one cohesive theory.

So, why did Marx hate François Guizot’s analysis of the French Revolution so much that he namechecked him in the first paragraph of The Communist Manifesto?

For Marx, the French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that answered the Political Question. Yes, it broke the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, but a liberal noble like the Marquis de Lafayette, who drafted (with input from slaver “gentlemen planter” Thomas Jefferson) the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, did not seek to upset the social order. He drafted a set of political rights, similar to the United States’ Bill of Rights, that declared citizens of the nation equal under the law.

To Marx, this was all a ruse to say that we are all free and equal brothers, but without the wealth redistribution that would actually make us free and equal brothers. The rising professional class increasingly held the majority of the nation’s wealth, but because of the ancient feudal order, little power in the affairs of state. So all the Declaration does is break apart the feudal order, held together by an absolute monarch, leaving a power vacuum to be filled…by whom?

The bourgeoisie themselves! The very liberal nobles, professional class, and provincial land-owners who wrote the new rules and toppled the old regime.

Marx Thought This Was a Bunch of Pretentious Bullshit Written to Mythologize the Wealthy’s Hostile Takeover of Inept, Ossified Feudal Monarchies.

This is incredibly important to understanding the roots of the Cold War that dominated 20th Century life across the planet. And it’s based in Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution.

In Marx’s analysis of the French Revolution, they looked past the liberal nobles of 1789 and the Jacobins of 1793. Those first two revolutions were merely political revolutions. For Marx, the first revolutionary to try to answer the Social Question was Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals.

Marx himself called Babeuf “the first modern Communist.”

“Gracchus” Babeuf was François-Noël Babeuf, taking the name of the Roman Gracchi Brothers, who served in the “plebeian tribunates” that were established after the fall of the kings, creating the Roman Republic. The Gracchi probably triggered the Republic’s collapse by instituting wide-scale land reform: They established a commission to survey land, assert state claim, and then redistribute it to the peasants. This move towards equality upended the entire social order of the Republic.

For Babeuf, this was the promise of the French Revolution. As in Rome, the revolutions of 1789 and 1793 merely established political rights. But to truly usher in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, “Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others.”

Babeuf worked as a land surveyor at the Revolution’s beginning, so he saw the actual, material effect on the peasantry literally in his daily work. Later, he founded Le Tribun du Peuple, a political journal where Babeuf advocated for what, today, would be considered bedrock socialist principles: a progressive income tax, land redistribution, the abolition of private property, and others.

Babeuf was executed as part of the Conspiracy of Equals, a failed coup against the French Directory that ruled after the execution of Robespierre. The Conspiracy’s Manifesto of Equals unmistakably reads today as the first pronunciation of Marxist principles: Denunciation of the “gutless and rich landowners,” “the new political Tartuffes seated in place of the old,” “the goal of society is the common happiness.”

Perhaps the most important idea Marx borrowed from Babeuf was the Two-Stage Theory of Revolution. In the words of Babeuf’s co-conspirator and actual author of the Manifesto, Sylvain Maréchal, “The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, one that will be greater, more solemn, and which will be the last.” Basically, the Bourgeois Revolution ushers in the democratic political rights, creating the space for the Socialist Revolution of wealth redistribution that will create true Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité.

According to None Other Than Karl Marx Himself, Gracchus Babeuf Was the First Communist.

Marx fleshed this out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). Of all the articles linked to, this is the one worth taking the five minutes to read in full. Marx opens with his famous quotation that the great historical figures occur twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Here, he lists the tragic figures of the original French Revolutionary period (Danton, Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte), and says, look, the Second Empire of Napoleon III is a joke, a sad parody of what happened from 1789-1814.

So, what happened from 1789-1814? In Marx’s view, the original French Revolution was capitalism overthrowing feudalism, with the “Rule of Law” and the “Rights of Man” as the legal foundation for rule by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

The rest of Marx’s essay employs an historical analysis to create this political theory, based in German philosophy (he borrows the “second as farce” quotation from the greatest of German philosophers, Hegel), British economics (he develops his theory around economic class), and grounded in the history and politics that played out in France.

Marx even dabbles in a bit of literary theory, saying that:

“The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future…Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to drug themselves concerning their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead. There, the phrase went beyond the content; here the content goes beyond the phrase.”

In other words, the French Revolution was a pathetic cosplay of the Roman Republic.

To Marx’s point, the author of The Declaration of the Rights Of Man, the Marquis de Lafayette, drew from his greatest influences: George Washington, the father figure in his life, and Thomas Jefferson, his intellectual guiding light. As we know, the Founding Fathers in the United States self-consciously modeled their new republic on Rome (that’s why it’s called the “Senate,” for example). In France, Lafayette modeled this thought, and even his political antithesis Maximillian Robespierre modeled his “Republic of Virtue” on the ideals of the Romans.

It’s why the Panthéon looks like that, it’s why our dollar bill looks like that, it’s why Napoleon said “I am a true Roman Emperor, I am of the best race of the Caesars–those who are the founders.”

The Best of the Race, in the Grand Tradition of Trying to Conquer All of Europe to Prove Yourself the Master of the Master Race.

Georges Lefebvre and the Marxist Tradition

The most influential historian who later worked in the Marxist tradition is Georges Lefebvre, whose The Coming of the French Revolution, was published in 1939 and, yes, it’s hard to see his analysis outside the context of Communism and Fascism rising out of the economic degradation of Europe after World War I. Lefebrvre is history’s foremost expert on the French peasantry, writing several histories of the Revolution from the 1920s through World War II. As such, Lefebvre–who grew up working class, educated in public schools–introduced the concept of History From Below: “history seen from below and not from above.”

This is the historiographical stance that history is best understood through the lives and social conditions of the vast majority of common people, rather than through the lives and actions of the “Great Men” of history–which often simplifies conflicts into hagiographical hero’s journey or tragic figure narratives. In the United States’ context, you may recognize this as the Howard Zinn A People’s History of the United States approach to history, whose narrative is grounded in the struggle of marginalized people fighting and gaining rights, rather than “Great Men” bestowing them from upon high.

This will become very important when we get to Dickens’ source material for A Tale of Two Cities, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. As we will see, Thomas Carlyle invented the “Great Man” theory of history. In many ways, the “history wars” of today are still a battle between “People’s History” and “Great Man” theories. Progressives tend to be “People’s History,” grounding the nation’s narrative in the various “grassroots” struggles for equality. Conservatives tend to be “Great Man,” seeing authority figures pronouncing great decrees based on traditional values from upon high. The struggle between these approaches often decides which textbooks get state contracts.

As for A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to be at war with his own source material: His novelist’s instinct is to humanize people, especially the poor. But he is also damning of the people! So, A Tale of Two Cities sometimes reads like A People’s History of the Reign of Terror, In Which The People Created a Literal Hell on Earth.

Back to Lefebvre, many of the French Revolution’s early histories left the Sans-culottes and the French peasantry voiceless: They were described and chronicled, but from the outside. Lefebvre’s extraordinary contribution, which started as his doctoral thesis, was actually collecting the existing documentation on the material conditions of the peasants’ lives. Lefebvre synthesized these documents into existing sources and analyses, creating a more total picture of the Revolution: Imagine a prestige “limited series” on the French Revolution, where each episode gives a perspective, and you see other events and characters from other episodes intersect from totally different perspectives, and that’s Lefebvre’s work.

Which is, largely, what Dickens accomplishes in A Tale of Two Cities. But where Lefebvre worked with the tools of a historian, Dickens borrowed from existing histories, synthesizing them through his novelist’s instincts, to create his total picture. Working in the Marxist tradition (though Lefebvre was much more of a social democrat than a communist) Lefebvre’s narrative sees the French Revolution as class struggle, where Dickens sees it as a Christian morality play.

Georges Lefebrve’s Chief Contribution to the French Revolution Historiography Was His Pain-staking Documentation of The Great Fear of 1789, In Which the French Peasants Generally Panicked About Everything Across Rural France.

Lenin, Stalin, and the Communists

There is way too much to cover, just know this: Much of this Marxist class struggle analysis is the foundation for Lenin’s Bolshevism, and his literal playbook for how to pull off the Russian Revolution, when it finally came, was firmly rooted in his understanding of the French Revolutions and the Paris Commune.

Literally, Lenin wrote extensive histories of the French Revolution, and deeply analyzed the contemporary political events in France to develop his playbook. And then the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 came, and he emerged the winner—largely by not making the mistakes of those revolutionaries who came before him.

It is, in no way, too much to say that the rise of Communism and the Cold War resulted from the historiography of the French Revolution.

Let’s briefly identify some insights–from Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and others–that became part of Communist theory and practice. Some of these are described in detail by Dickens before Marx published his analysis, almost as if Dickens looked through a microscope to see the beginnings of Communism in a petri dish labelled “Class Conflict.” Really, most of Dickens is itself Class Conflict.

First is the identification of the Proletariat as the “Revolutionary Class.” Marx’s “discovery” of the revolutionary class, the “Proletariat” grows directly out of his analysis of the French Revolution. It wasn’t just the bourgeoisie who toppled the regime: The urban working class Sans-culotte tipped the scales with direct action in the streets, marching on Versailles, and organizing on their own, apart from the salon radicals and liberal nobles. More than just their poverty, the urban workers’ proximity to power is the special ingredient that gives them revolutionary power.

This is precisely who Dickens personifies in the poor neighborhoods of eastern Paris, and describes how the Sans-culotte were able to radicalize their brethren in the countryside. Dickens describes several seminal events of the French Revolution from the perspective of the Sans-culottes, without naming them, of course, because “The Women’s March on Versailles” wasn’t The Women’s March on Versailles while the women were marching on Versailles.

Second is Dekulakization. The kulaks are the sub-class of wealthy peasants and provincials who stood to lose the most by the redistribution of land and nationalization of the economy. Stalin identified them as enemies of Communism and killed about 5 million of them. Dickens identifies this class (the “Farmer-Generals”) in Cities, and describes how they merged noble titles and actual wealth to create the counter-revolutionary reactionary class. If you understand Stalin’s great terror campaign, you’ll immediately recognize this in Dickens.

Third is Terror as a Political Tactic. Lenin and Dickens came to the same conclusion about why the French Revolution basically invented “terror” as a political tactic: Poverty itself is dehumanizing, so the aristocrats got exactly what they deserved and should have expected—and once old authority is broken, and there’s nothing to constrain people’s behavior, this opens the door to terror. In literatures, this is Joseph Conrad’s explanation for genocide in Heart of Darkness. As for Lenin, he downplayed the violence of the Reign of Terror as either necessary or justified—you can’t have a revolution without a revolution.

Dickens saw poverty as inflicting a cycle of violence, which stops only when the poverty stops…or just wears itself out. In A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens seems to anticipate Stalin, that revolutionary violence only leads the oppressed to become the oppressors. If you want to boil Cities down to a thesis, Roger Daltry pretty much nails it.

They Assessed the Incomplete Work of the French Revolution and Paris Commune, and When Their Time Came, They Chose Ultra-Violence to Finish the Job. And Started the Cold War, And Killed 20 Million of Their Own People, and Brought the World to the Brink of Nuclear Annihilation. In 1859, Charles Dickens Also Assessed the French Revolution, Saw an Apocalypse, and More or Less Predicted This Future.

Thomas Carlyle Freaks Out After Seeing Parliament Burn, Gets Infatuated With Napoleon and Frederick the Great, Lets His Racist and Antisemitic Freak Flag Fly, and Less Than a Century Later Hitler Says, Yes, This is All Correct, We Need a Final Solution.

In his Preface to A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens cites two sources for his novel: The Frozen Deep, a play by his friend Wilike Collins in which Dickens himself played the lead character in a production staged in his own house (more on this later), and…

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History. One of the strangest history books ever conceived.

Dickens wrote that he hopes to “add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding that terrible time,” but “no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.”

This “wonderful book” will become one of the source texts for Fascism, with Thomas Carlyle as the “Founding Father of Fascism.” In his time, Carlyle was the “Sage of Chelsea” and “the undoubted head of English letters,” but history has not looked kindly upon his becoming the dictator-apologist and originator of the “Great Man Theory of History”. And, an open racist and colonialist who advocated for the “beneficent whip” to keep the lesser races in their place across the British Empire.

But for me, this does not mean that A Tale of Two Cities is a fascist text at all. In fact, Dickens adds quite a bit to the philosophy of Carlyle’s book, asking tough questions about the Christian faith, human nature—and how these intertwine into history, politics, and why things are the way they are and will always be.

We will first discuss Thomas Carlyle himself, his philosophy, and how he came to be regarded as the proto-Fascist philosopher.

Thomas Carlyle: One of the Most Consequential Men of History You’ve Never Heard Of. He Was One of the First English Language Chroniclers of the French Revolution, and One of His Books Ended Up in the Führerbunker. He Was Charles Dickens’ Friend and Idol, But They Ended Up Seeing the Revolution Very Differently.

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle was born into modest circumstances in 1795 in a tiny Scottish village to James Carlyle, a stonemason and farmer, and Margaret Aitken Carlyle, a servant. James and Margaret were deeply religious, and though they were poor laborers, they taught him reading and arithmetic. His mother apparently suffered from manic episodes, so little Thomas dove into his studies, gaining entry to the University of Edinburgh. Legend has it, he walked 100 miles to attend college.

Thomas Carlyle is one of the great polymaths in Scottish intellectual history, and that’s saying something. Carlyle is credited with genuine astronomical, mineralogical, and mathematical discoveries, like the Carlyle Circle. He spent some post-graduation time as a minister, teacher, and writer. Most relevant to us, Carlyle dove into Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which threw him into a crisis of faith: “I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true.”

In this early biography, you can see the seeds of Carlyle’s philosophy being planted. His parents imbued him with the Calvinist thinking of the Scottish Presbyterian church: God chooses only the predestined “Elect” for Heaven. His scientific and mathematical mind needed to make sense of the world, ordered by clear and inviolable rules and principles. So, when he read Gibbon, he filtered it through this sense of the Elect and the need for order.

Thus, when Gibbon says that Rome’s progression of kings and emperors and caesars fell because barbarians broke the social order that imbued the empire with “civic virtue,” well, you can see the beginnings of the “Great Man Theory of History.” If you remove God from the equation, then embody civic virtue in a special Elect that excludes the barbarians, this is the foundation for the modern concept of the nationalist dictator.

At this point, Carlyle was still in his twenties, and though enormously talented, was not yet a made man of letters. So in 1834, the newly-married Thomas and Jane Carlyle did what most British intellectuals end up doing: Moving to London. Carlyle was looking for a publisher for his, in my view totally unreadable, German-philosophy-inspired, semi-fictional-autobiographical “comic” novel Sartor Resartus, Soon, they moved into 5 Cheyne Row in Chelsea, which became their home, and a secular place of pilgrimage for British writers and intellectuals, for the next fifty years.

For the next fifty years, this house is where Carlyle became the most important intellectual of his day, befriending and influencing nearly every single significant British writer, scientist, politician, clergyman during his life. Today, it’s a British National Trust museum simply known as Carlyle’s House, mostly done up as Jane kept it.

The Author In Front of Carlyle’s House on Cheyne Row. It’s Open on Wednesdays, the Only Time You Can See the Desk Where He Wrote Proto-Fascist Biographies of Great Men

Today Carlyle is a mostly obscure figure, his reputation taking a major hit during and after World War II, for reasons that we’ll get to. But for now, understand that his influence on English letters during the 1800s is almost impossible to overstate.

This 1857 Article from The Atlantic Wants You to Put Some Respect on the Name of Thomas Carlyle.

What work put Carlyle on the path to high-priesthood of modern literature, to whom all contemporary minds are indebted?

Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History

Sartor Resartus didn’t sell well, and Carlyle, true to his Calvinist roots, wondered whether he was destined for greatness. He needed a new subject, something grand in scope and stature that could contain all his ideas about history, art, religion, nature….everything. His friend and intellectual rival, the utilitarian liberal radical John Stuart Mill, approached Carlyle about completing one of his unfinished projects, a sweeping history of the French Revolution. Carlyle agreed, and Mill dumped all his primary and secondary sources at his doorstep.

On October 16th, 1834, the Palace of Westminster caught fire in an accident involving the “tally sticks” officially used by the Exchequer to record the budget. The sticks were to be burned in the House of Lords’ furnace, in a ceremony that Charles Dickens described in a speech to the Administrative Reform Association as an “obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom.” Carlyle witnessed the conflagration that swallowed most of the medieval palace, and four days later, he wrote to his brother he would publish a volume on the French Revolution.

“The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, October 16, 1834” by J.M.W. Turner. Thomas Carlyle Saw This and Said, Now I’ve Got to Speed-Write This History of the French Revolution!

Carlyle finished Volume 1 of the manuscript, gave it to Mill for review, and on March 6th 1835, a stricken Mill appeared at Carlyle’s House in Chelsea. Apparently, Mill’s housemaid thought it was trash (perhaps she wasn’t wrong?!), and used it kindling (again, perhaps not wrong??).

After talking it over, Carlyle declared that it “shall be written again,” the subsequent rewrite, which Carlyle called “an improvisation,” took on “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “come hot out of my own soul.” This is key to understanding this hugely influential, highly experimental, and for my eyes, profoundly weird approach to history.

Carlyle’s Style in The French Revolution: A History

As a polymath, Carlyle wrote in different styles. In his early career, Carlyle wrote theoretical mathematics papers and published scientific articles. As he transitioned into philosophy and history, especially after discovering German philosophy, he employed a more florid style. He made money translating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from German to English, a literary more than scientific exercise (this will become important later!). Then with Sartor Resartus, Carlyle transitioned into semi-fiction.

So, Carlyle was unafraid to experiment stylistically, and for the French Revolution, he did an impression of epic Greek and Roman poetry: A narrative history centered on characters, employing figurative language sewing together several narrative arcs into grand set pieces. Carlyle invokes Clio, the Muse of History, writing in the first-person plural in the present tense, as if Carlyle himself is the muse transporting us to July 1789 Paris in the middle of the action:

“The Bastille is besieged! On, then, all Frenchmen that have hearts in your bodies! Roar with all your throats of cartilage and metal, ye Sons of Liberty; stir spasmodically whatsoever of utmost faculty is in you, soul, body, or spirit; for it is the hour! Smite, thou Louris Tournay, cartwright of the Marais, old-soldier of the Regiment Dauphiné; smite at that Outer Drawbridge chain, though the fiery hail whistles round thee!”

The whole thing is like this!

Carlyle was reacting to the detached style of his greatest influence, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Carlyle felt that mere scholarship was inadequate for History. He wanted to do more than argue an interpretation based on a reasoned analysis of a deep reading of primary and reliable secondary sources. Having worked as a scientist and mathematician, Carlyle didn’t see History as a science. It needs narrative as well, something to explain the humanity of History.

As they write in their Introduction to The French Revolution: A History, David Sorenson and Brent Kinser say that Gibbon’s History “helped extinguish Carlyle’s belief in orthodox Christianity, but it also awakened in him an abiding appreciation of history as a spiritual exercise.”

So, how does an agnostic Roman Empire enthusiast engage in history spiritually?

By writing History like it’s Epic Poetry. With far more dashes and exclamation points.

The National Endowment for the Humanities Makes a Good Point: Thomas Carlyle and the Painter Eugene Delacroix Tell the Story of the French Revolution in The Same Tone.

Carlyle’s Theory of History

Carlyle’s Epic Poetry form was calculated to meet his philosophical function. Most of his Theory of History was developed in Sartor Resartus, then applied in The French Revolution: A History.

To unpack this, we need to understand the foundation of German philosophy, the Hegelian Dialectic. This is the Thesis / Antithesis / Synthesis formulation in which you start with a thesis idea, propose its antithesis, then bring these opposites into union with the synthesis.

So, for Caryle, he begins with a series of paradoxes: History is not a science because, unlike the “hard” sciences, there are no immutable laws of human experience that explain Why Things Happen in a predictable way. On the other hand, the “truths” of the poets are too abstract to explain Why Things Happen because they are narrative concoctions unmoored to the empirical facts in the historical record.

So, the facts are the facts, but the facts aren’t enough. Accuracy is important, but inadequate, because no historical record is ever complete, and an interpretation of facts is always subject to revision.

To bring these opposites into union, imagination can fill in the gaps between known facts, as long as that imagination is reasonable enough to create plausible explanations for Why Things Happen.

For Carlyle, this is the difference between fictional and historical narratives. Fictional narratives are abstract philosophies expressed in concocted narratives. Historical narratives flow from specific facts where the historian fills in gaps using tools from the poets and scientists, both imagination and reason, to create a human impression of the experience.

This is why Carlyle’s French Revolution is so chaotic. Events in real life do not unfold according to clear narrative because chance, free will, and coincidence defy systematic narrative and cause-effect reasoning.

Some Religious Scholars Call This the “Devil’s Logic” Because It Defies The Absolute Moral Authority of God.

For Carlyle, history is not science, it’s not poetry, so what is it?

Natural Supernaturalism

To way oversimplify this, Carlyle saw the supernatural in the chaos of nature. The world has too many variables, both scientific and human, to be predictable. This disorder is actually proof of the Divine: Only the Divine can understand the ordered disorder of the Universe.

In this way, miracles are the natural extension of science because their very defiance of scientific explanation is how you know it’s a miracle. Imagination and faith are an extension of reason because reason can only understand what’s in the physical world, that’s how you know the supernatural is in the realm of imagination and faith.

So, all things in nature are both physical realities with abstract symbolic meaning. This is what Carlyle considered his “Philosophy of Clothes”: “All visible things are emblems.” Basically, clothes are the outward symbols of who we are underneath, so to understand the man, you need to understand how he chooses to dress. From here, he gets into all sorts of trippy Transcendental ideas that deeply influenced Emerson and Thoreau, but that’s the gist.

Once we understand that physical reality is imbued with abstract symbolic meaning, then we can really read History in all its factual and poetic glory. This is how Carlyle developed the idea of the “Bible of Universal History”: The “right interpretation of Reality and History” that combines facts and poetry into the Great Epic that is the life-cycle of all societies.

So, what is the narrative arc of this Great Epic?

The “Burning of a World-Phoenix”: the cycle of a civilization that burns itself to ashes, then renews and rises again.

In other words, the Cycle of Revolution. Literally derived from the old French word for revolving celestial bodies, which the French first applied to History to describe the overthrow of the English Stuart Dynasty in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

This is the most important idea that Dickens borrows from Carlyle, employing symbolism over and over in A Tale of Two Cities to convey the natural and, especially for Dickens, supernatural inevitability of the Revolution: the bloody grindstones sharpening guillotine blades, the fountains of Paris washing the blood away, that kind of thing.

But there is a crucial difference between Dickens and Carlyle: Dickens wrote about the World-Phoenix in an explicitly Christian context, asking us to consider what it really means to follow Jesus’ example literally. Carlyle, on the other hand, finds the World-Phoenix in the actions of Great Men, who bend history to their will.

That’s why all this matters for us. All of that intellectual gobbledygook is how Thomas Carlyle gets to the Great Man of History, and how he becomes the Founding Father of Fascism.

The Secrets of the Universe Are Held Within the Refractory Clothes-Philosophy of World-Embracing Phantasms of TIME and SPACE.

How does Carlyle get from the French Revolution, to the Great Man Theory of History, to the Intellectual Underpinnings of Fascism?

Upon The French Revolution: A History’s release, his rival and admirer John Stuart Mill compared it to the Iliad and the Aeneid, writing that “This is not so much a history, as an epic poem…the history of the French Revolution, and the poetry of it, both in one; and on the whole no work of greater genius, either historical or poetic, has been produced in this country for many years.”

For me, more than the Iliad or the Aeneid, Carlyle’s influence that advances him to Great Man Theory is John Milton and Paradise Lost, which begins:

Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,

The “one greater man”? Christ, who plays the role of God on Earth, who will restore Order after the Apocalypse.

The entire theology of Paradise Lost is outside our scope, but in short: Chaos was the “original matter” that existed before God created the Universe. The original matter was a chaotic mess–but it was not evil because “it contained the seeds of all subsequent good.” As Milton put it:

It was in a confused and disordered state at first, but afterwards, God made it ordered and beautiful.

That’s the role of the Greater Man, the Son of God, the Christ. To return and restore beautiful order to God’s creation.

But what if, like Carlyle, you believe that “Christianity was not true”? Who plays these roles in our world?

According to Carlyle, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The charismatic ones we should follow.

“Satan Arousing the Rebel Angels” by William Blake (1808). I Will Humbly Submit That Thomas Carlyle Got Paradise Lost So Wrong He’s Actually Glorifying This.

In 1840, directly following the success of The French Revolution: A History, Carlyle published On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History. In it, he identifies six types of Great Men (Divinity, Prophet, Poet, Priest, Man of Letters, and King). His Hero Kings are Oliver Cromwell and…Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in Carlyle’s telling “bl(ew) into space” the French Revolution with his “Whiff of Grapeshot.” In other words, the Revolution descended France into chaos, and the Great Man Bonaparte put it back in order:

“His mission is Order; every man’s is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order…Is not all work of man in this world a making of Order? The carpenter finds rough trees; shapes them, constrains them into square fitness, into purpose and use…it is tragical for us all to be concerned in image-breaking and down-pulling; for the Great Man, more a man than we, it is doubly tragical….While man is man, some Cromwell or Napoleon is the necessary finish of a Sansculottism.

Carlyle’s hero-kings were more highly evolved specimens, with superior intellect and natural leadership, but also are “the living light-fountain…not as a kindled lamp only, but rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift of Heaven.” And on and on and on.

In other words, their natural charisma is why we should follow them to greatness.

So, Carlyle constructs Great Man Theory from epic poetry about God, arguing that they have the singular ability to bend history to their will through their natural gifts and charisma, and that we should not only want this, but we should literally worship them for doing so.

For me, this is what takes us back to Milton, who Carlyle wrote about in letters to his wife and was the touchstone British writer for the Victorians. The heroes Carlyle describes aren’t God, but Satan. I mean, that’s very famously the entire point of Milton’s Epic: His Satan is so charismatic that it’s easy to see him as the rebellious hero fighting to restore order against a tyrannical God whose world descended into chaos!

This is also the point of Goethe’s Faust, which gave us the Faustian Bargain. And whom Thomas Carlyle championed in the English speaking world through his translation work. We, the Christian reader, must have the moral discipline to resist the allure of the charismatic Satan, lets we lose our eternal soul!

But, Napoleon is exactly this kind of charismatic leader: Brilliant general whose strategies revolutionized warfare for a century, rationalized the French bureaucracy to administer an entire Continental System, wrote the Napoleonic code that created a Rule of Law to replace the Personal Rule of Kings…

And yet, Napoleon became Emperor years after order was mostly restored following the Reign of Terror—and his wars killed 5,000,000 people in 12 years. Napoleon was a charismatic leader who is almost single-handedly responsible for a proportional number of deaths as World War I.

As for Carlyle’s other Great King, Oliver Cromwell? Ask the Irish about Oliver Cromwell–even The Cromwell Association more or less admits that he committed war crimes during an ethnic cleansing campaign in Ireland, though they do say their guy “was sent to Ireland because it was in chaos.” That’s always the reason The Great Man Has To Restore Order.

Do Great Men Create Wars That Result in 5,000,000 Corpses Strewn from Lisbon to Moscow? Thomas Carlyle Emphatically Thinks So. “Napoleon’s Retreat from Moscow” by Adolphe Northen (1851).

Carlyle’s Path to the Führerbunker

Carlyle would make a career writing hagiographies of Great Men, most notably his History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great. It’s fair to say that this biography isn’t Carlyle’s most “Great Man” work: I haven’t plowed through all 21 books, but in what I’ve read, his Frederick is genuinely an enlightened absolutist whose diligent labor builds a great nation in all manner of sciences and arts.

Applied in the military context, Frederick the Great’s modernization project lays the groundwork for what would become the “militarism” of Prussia, in which the great Prussian war machine would later embody nation’s glory, ultimately becoming the force that unified the German states.

This is where Frederick’s legacy was consciously, openly appropriated by the Nazis–so much so that it was criticized during the Third Reich in American newspapers. In this telling, Frederick the Great and Peter the Great “really merited their adjectives” for creating great nations from stagnant feudal societies–and surely Frederick “would look upon Hitler and his undertakings with disgust and hostility.”

Why? Frederick was “one of the great cosmopolitans of European history” who “harried no Jews and antagonized no Catholics.” What Hitler and Goebbels did was use Frederick to dress up their rank bigotry as a project of national greatness, to transform the Final Solution into some sort of victory against Germany’s enemies, somehow like Frederick against all of Continental Europe during the Seven Years War.

This is where Carlyle became useful for the Nazis: His extravagant Great Man Theory provided them with the Charismatic Leader Mythology, grounded in both German philosophy and secular deity worship, that allowed Hitler to cast himself in the tradition of Frederick.

The German use of Carlyle was not simply confined to philosophy journals. The most influential German-language author of his day, the aforementioned writer of Faust Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called Carlyle “a moral force of great importance.” Carlyle’s Frederick biography was read in German schools to help create a shared memory for the new empire. Carlyle’s cosmic Theory of Order was used as an intellectual foundation for Prussian militarism, which led to Heroes and Hero-Worship being used to teach leadership principles. Later German writers claimed that Carlyle’s obvious Volkscharakter means that he must have had German blood.

William Joyce, the American-born Nazi propagandist, moved to England, joined the British Union of Fascists, then founded the National Socialist League, where he named its political arm…

The Carlyle Club.

“Germany’s Savior” Postcard from 1933, Depicting Hitler Shaking Hands With Paul von Hindenburg In Front of the Literal Spirit of Frederick the Great. Thomas Carlyle is In Part Responsible For This.

“What the King conquered, the Prince founded, the Field Marshall defended, and the Soldier saved and united” Nazi Postcard from 1933, Depicting Hitler in the Tradition of Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck (the chancellor who unified Germany), and Paul von Hindenburg, great Field Marshal of World War I and Second President of the Weimar Republic. Thomas Carlyle Provided the Intellectual Framework For Hitler to Put Himself On the Card.

The Secret Sauce of Carlyle’s Proto-Fascism: Overt Racism and Virulent Antisemitism

Great Man-ism alone doesn’t explain the affinity that Fascists had for Carlyle. He published one of the most racist essays you’ll ever read, “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (1849)--which Carlyle titled with the hard-r in 1853.

The essay’s frame narrative is an anonymous speech transcribed by a reporter, which feels like a sheepish attempt to distance the author from the views, which is colonial gutter racism, shocking even for its time. Carlyle’s “satire” is directed at “My Philanthropic Friends” like the abolitionist John Stuart Mill (again!), who “shall hear what I have to say on the matter; and probably you will not in the least like it.” After his and Mill’s public debates, in subsequent publications Carlyle dropped the frame narrative entirely, leaving no distance between him and his racism.

As someone who has read a lot of colonialist English racist authors as part of a Literature degree, in my considered view, Carlyle puts on a racism master class. Slave ships weren’t that bad, you can’t stop the slave trade, so why not ship them to the “sugar colonies” of the West Indies where they can be tended to by benevolent white masters, and on and on.

Recalling Oliver Cromwell, Carlyle even goes in on the Irish, who–like their inferior race pumpkin-obsessed brethren in Africa–are subhuman potato mongers. More or less, Carlyle blames the potato blight of the Hungry 40s and the starvation of millions of Irish not on English colonial expropriation of the remaining potato crop, but the fact that the Irish are such unevolved heathens that they deserved to be “sluttishly starving.”

To understand the depth of Carlyle’s racism, and why the Fascists shined to him, It’s worth reading a passage in full. Here, he equates Irish and Africans because in Carlyle’s mind, “Africa” isn’t a continent of peoples, but just sorta where all the subhuman “blacks” live. And, because the Irish are just as barbarian as the “African”, this is how Carlyle bolstered he Nazi “master race” narrative that justified conquest of “inferior” whites across Europe: The West Indies are just “black Ireland.”

If the Africans that are already there could be made to lay down their pumpkins and labor for a living, there are already Africans enough. If the new Africans, after laboring a little, take to pumpkins like the others, what remedy is there? To bring in new and ever new Africans, say you, till pumpkins themselves grow dear—till the country is crowded with Africans, and black men there, like white men here, are forced, by hunger, to labor for their living? That will be a consummation. To have “emancipated the West Indies into a black Ireland–”free,” indeed, but an Ireland, and black! The world may yet see prodigies, and reality be stranger than a nightmare dream.

Our own white or sallow Ireland, sluttishly starving, from age to age, on its act-of-parliament “freed,” was hitherto the flower of mismanagement among the nations; but what will this be to a negro Ireland, with pumpkins themselves fallen scare like potatoes? Imagination cannot fathom such an object; the belly of chaos never held the like.

This Isn’t What Carlyle Was Talking About, But There Really Is a Black Irish Community on Montserrat in the West Indies. It’s Complicated, But They Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on an Island Where Thomas Carlyle’s Hero Oliver Cromwell Deported Trouble-making Irish to Work the British Sugar Plantations.

At this point, do we even need to talk about the antisemitism? In his chapter on John Locke in A History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell traces the development of Fascism through Fichte, Byron, Carlyle, and Nietzche, whose logical outcome was Hitler. In 1930, H.J.C. Grierson delivered a lecture in Manchester documenting Carlyle’s antisemitism and other master-race writing entitled “Carlyle and the Hero.” Three years later, he changed the title to “Carlyle and Hitler.”

This was Charles Dickens’ primary source for A Tale of Two Cities, but as we will discuss in Part 5, Dickens used that history to develop a completely different meaning of the French Revolution.

How Did Dickens Get From That to This?

Because Charles Dickens’ source material was created by the proto-Fascist philosopher, does that mean that Charles Dickens was also a proto-Fascist, or that A Tale of Two Cities is a proto-Fascist book? Not really.

Thomas Carlyle’s Influence on Charles Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities

First, Dickens’ view of human nature, especially in his later career, leaves no room at all for the idea that a Great Man Will Come to Save Us. As George Orwell noted, in Dickens’ early career, to achieve his hit-making happy endings, rich guys showed up and showered everybody with money to make their problems go away. But as Dickens got older, and accumulated money in his own right, that “Good Rich Man” character tended to disappear. In A Tale of Two Cities, nobody is showing up to strong-arm the Reign of Terror to a halt. In fact, it ends well before Napoleon’s “Whiff of Grapeshot,” and as we’ll discuss…..Dickens just sorta skips right over all that Empire business.

Second, Dickens absolutely borrows from Carlyle’s conception of the “Bible of Universal History” and “Burning of the World-Phoenix” theory of history. But crucially, Dickens comes to the opposite conclusion of Carlyle. No spoilers, but as discussed, Carlyle concludes that charismatic leaders are the drivers of history, perhaps accidentally invoking Satan in Paradise Lost. Dickens is a deeply Christian man, unlike Carlyle, so he contemplates the Burning of the World-Phoenix according to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Dickens doesn’t ask, How does a Great Man create Order from Chaos? Rather, he asks, in the midst of apocalyptic chaos, what does following Christ’s example really look like? Yes, A Tale of Two Cities asks, What Would Jesus Do?

This is where I think Dickens’ reputation as a “popular” or, as Aldous Huxley wrote, “vulgar” writer is unfair. As we will painstakingly document, Dickens’ can bring all the Milton and Shakespeare allusions and deep historical understanding as well as a giant like Thomas Carlyle.

But for me, Dickens’ gift is to package this in compelling narrative, conveyed through striking visual poetry, with a “narration camera” that anticipates the grand epics of cinema, filling in the blanks between facts with convincingly human portraits–while contemplating the great questions of History and the Divine.

Dickens structures Cities somewhat on The French Revolution: A History, opening in pre-Revolution gathering of clouds before the storm. And Dickens borrows some of Carlyle’s poetic motifs, and descriptions of certain scenes, etc. Dickens reconceptualizes Carlyle’s first-person plural, present-tense muse-narrator as an all-encompassing God Tense narrator with, well, Charles Dickens playing the role.

For me, here’s what it comes down to: Dickens creates a moral treatise that asks why things got this way and what we should when it gets this way. In contrast, Carlyle created a roadmap for Fascists. Carlyle’s writing reads like… the work of a failed fiction writer with an exaggerated sense of his own genius, who is prone to unintentionally comic purple prose and unbearably pretentious over-writing. And Charles Dickens is one of the great prose stylists in the English language.

A Tale of Two Cities isn’t a melodrama stuffed into The French Revolution. It’s a treatise all its own.

When You’re In the London Library During COVID, and You Find Their Copy of A Tale of Two Cities From an Original 1859 Publication.

But Let’s Not Forget Charles Dickens’ Colonialism, Racism, and Antisemitism

In the end, it must be said: Charles Dickens sent his sons to serve across the British Empire (the British Navy, East India Company, Bengal Mounted Police, Canada’s Northwest Mounted Police, Australia’s Parliament). He wrote to a friend that if he were the Commander in Chief in India, he would “do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested…and raze it off the face of the Earth.” And there’s plenty more that historians are grappling with, which was re-engaged after the George Floyd protests in 2020.

Dickens was an abolitionist who was shocked and scandalized by American slavery during his American tours. But he did join Thomas Carlyle and the racist reactionaries in The Eyre Case, involving the debate over whether the British Governor of Jamaica should have been prosecuted for killing or flogging over a 1,000 Blacks, and burning over a thousand of their buildings.

The original version of Oliver Twist is shockingly antisemitic to today’s ears–he refers to Fagin as “The Jew” 257 times. But when Eliza Davis, a Jewish woman whose husband bought one of Dickens’ homes, complained that he had “encouraged a vile prejudice against the despised Hebrew,” Dickens stopped the printing of Oliver Twist to change the text, and later edited out Jewish stereotypes of Fagin and stopped doing antisemitic voices during public readings.

Or, in the most charitable light, Charles Dickens learned not to be antisemitic because he has Jewish friends now.

And, as we’ll talk about, the play in which he borrowed part of the Cities plot is an attack on the Inuit, accusing them of both sabotaging a failed English arctic exploration and for the cannibalism that was likely committed by the ill-equipped English themselves.

Long story short, I will write more about this later—it’s become the most discussed area of Dickens Studies in the Charles Dickens Society.

Alec Guiness’s Fagin in David Lean’s 1948 Oliver Twist Was Created to Look Like George Cruikshank’s Illustrations from the 1838 Publication. Jewish Activists Blocked Its Release in the U.S. Because it Seemed Wrong to Promote Antisemitic Stereotypes Three Years After the Liberation of Concentration Camps.

Other Sources for A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is less “Based on a True Story” and more “Inspired by True Events.” Think of it this way: The “story” of Cities draws from the aforementioned Wilkie Collins play The Frozen Deep. The “true events” come from Dickens’ various French Revolution sources.

For now, I want to set aside Dickens’ construction of the main plot inspired by The Frozen Deep: Both because of potential spoilers, but also because of the enormous drama surrounding The Frozen Deep, even aside from the cannibalism-inspired native-savage plot. Dickens and Wilkie Collins were good friends and traveling companions, so much so that the Dickens Museum created a whole exhibition dedicated to them.

We will cover most this, but long, long story short: Dickens starred as the leading man in The Frozen Deep, his marriage was falling apart because his wife had ten kids and spent most of her adult life pregnant, so he became infatuated with an eighteen year old he shared the stage with, carried on an affair, sued his publishers who wouldn’t publish his letter regarding the allegations, tried to have his wife committed, went through a public divorce, got in a trainwreck (literal one, not figurative) that he fled so his mistress wouldn’t be revealed.

The legendary academic Claire Tomalin found the receipts and documented the whole thing in The Invisible Woman, which was adapted into a movie with Ralph Fiennes as Charles Dickens. It’s really all just too much for us now.

Charles Dickens Played the Lead, Then Partook of a Half-an-Hour of Refreshment

As for the true events, in a letter to Carlyle, Dickens asked for sources specifically about ordinary lives in France, and within two weeks, “two cartloads of books” were delivered to his house from Carlyle’s London Library. Knowing Dickens, he probably exaggerated this to preempt accusations of historical inaccuracy, but he does seem to have aligned his fictional plot to Carlyle’s telling of historical events. Still, Dickens leaves out many “set pieces” of the Revolution: The Flight to Varennes, Louis XVI’s execution, and others. He selects other events (the Women’s March to Versailles and the September Massacres, most notably) as ways to advance the personal story that happens within the Revolution.

For those steeped in the Revolution’s history, Dickens’ narrative is disorienting: The relatively short time between the book’s opening at the Storming of the Bastille feels shorter than it was, but then the climactic piece during the height of the Massacres and the Terror feel much longer than it was. To give Dickens the benefit of the doubt, this feel of the passage of time was, likely, what people experienced: The September Massacres only occured for four days, but they were the longest four days of any Parisian’s life.

Other researchers have dug into the particulars of what was on Dickens’ bookshelf at his various houses (he seems to have swapped one copy of Carlyle’s book for another at one point), and what Carlyle might have pulled off the shelves of the London Library, which he likely footnoted in his own book.

This leads us to Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s twelve-volume work Le Nouveau Paris (1797) and Tableau de Paris (1788). The stories of the Monseigneur’s ostentatious chocolate, the out-of-control carriage of the Monsieur de Marquis, the traumatized Dr. Manette, and others seem drawn from details in these books–and in some cases, Dickens directly lifts paragraphs of details to construct scenes and portraits.

The Author’s Pictures From Deep Within the Stacks London Library, Founded in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle, Author of The French Revolution: A History and Charles Dickens’ Primary Source for A Tale of Two Cities. I Eventually Found a Source for the Source, Louis Sebastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris, But Unfortunately, It Isn’t Carlyle’s Copy

Dickens’ Methodology

As far as we can tell, Dickens had a main plot in mind, and a few subplots, and needed actual events and eye-witness accounts to build out the entire multi-dimensional narrative. He read Carlyle and Mercier and Rousseau and a few other volumes (doesn’t seem to be “two cartloads” of sources), and with his novelist’s eye, picked out some colorful details and anecdotes to build scenes. From here, he built characters out of these scenes, then stitched these characters into this grand narrative. If you understand A Tale of Two Cities as a prestige tv limited series, with each episode focused on specific characters or places, then brought together in the final episodes, that’s what Dickens does.

This is why, I think, Dickens’ overall interpretation of events is convincing: He used the same types of sources as many later historians. Dickens was criticized for “not being a philosopher” or whatever, but he seems to have done as much homework as needed to create a narrative. A Tale of Two Cities’ genius isn’t that it’s a comprehensive history, but it’s a deeply human impression of the terror: Think of it more as a series of slice-of-life sketches–the kind of writing that made Dickens’ career–than a twelve-volume magnum opus. For reference, to prepare for my own trip to the London Library, I used J.A. Falconer’s “The Sources of A Tale of Two Cities” and Andrew Sanders’ “‘Cartloads of Books’: Some Sources for A Tale of Two Cities.”

The Plagiarism Scandal

One final note: Dickens might have plagiarized the plot from a play staged in London in 1856, two years before he began working on Cities. Watts Phillips’ The Dead Heart is also set in the French Revolution, beginning in 1771, a man gets thrown into the Bastille via lettre de cachet, when he’s released his brain is broken by the experience…the plots are so closely drawn that it can’t be coincidence. And even though Phillips’ work was produced well before Dickens began work, it was the less-famous Phillips who took the plagiarism accusation.

Entire articles and investigation have tried to unravel this, and most Dickensians conclude that Dickens didn’t plagiarize from Watts, but they relied on the same sources. For me, it seems a bit convenient that Watts and Dickens would have drawn from the same details in Carlye’s and Mercier’s works to create very similar plots. And, we know that Dickens was an avid theatergoer, fancied himself an actor himself, so it seems possible that he would have attended Watts’ play, or at least been told of the plot.

I can put together the story like this. This was an extremely chaotic period in Dickens life: Feuding with his publishers, scrambling to pay for his large family and extravagant lifestyle, decades of workaholism shredding his nerves, growing disillusioned with his wife, and then, needing a hit, taking a big swing by concocting a sweeping historical fiction based on the French Revolution. He’s got a seed idea for a plot, but needs to plant it in the history. Then his buddy Carlyle dumps two cartloads of books at his house while he’s also running charities, lobbying Parliament, and starting up his own literary magazine.

And now you see this play from a much less famous writer that’s already started the seedling. So you dig it up, plant it in your own book, figuring that, now that it’s on the estate of the famous Charles Dickens, it’s your tree now. I can prove that, nobody has, but I can see how Dickens would have gotten there. We’ve all been tempted to cheat on our homework when we don’t feel like we have time to do it.

They Had a Lot in Common!

Ok, now that we’re finally to the end, remember that all this is important to our discussion of the book. We will tackle:

1) How Dickens analyzed the causes of the Revolution,

2) How this understanding flows from Dickens’ view of human nature,

3) How this view of human nature informs his individual theory of history,

3) How Dickens’ Christianity flows from these views on human nature and history,

4) How these ideas can help us grapple with our current political moment, and

5) How to think deeply about all of it….because Dickens accomplishes, through fiction, what is beyond the scope of historians, philosophers, and politicians.

These Guys Both Understood That Attention Is More Powerful Than Money

Days before the Second Inauguration of Donald Trump, I listened to this podcast episode, a conversation between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes on Hayes’ new book, The Sirens’ Call. I haven’t read the book, but based on this conversation, this is how I understand the thesis:

In the post-industrial modern world, our most important and scarcest commodity is attention.

In Hayes’ framing, our political system is best understood as “Attention Capitalism.” Meaning, as modern technology has increased our ability to produce “content,” power is increasingly concentrated in those who command attention on their content. Money is important because it buys the means to produce, distribute, and control content, but money itself is really just a means to the attention that influences minds and directs actions.

Whatever you think of Hayes and Klein, it’s not a coincidence that two guys who rose up out of the Blog Era of the early internet to become international media stars hit upon this thesis. For me, Hayes and Klein are two of the most thoughtful left-of-center pundits, diving deeper into philosophy and history in their longform podcasts and books. Here, Hayes traces “Attention Capitalism” to the Industrial Revolution, in which:

“human effort gets embedded in a set of in a set of institutions–legal institutions, market institutions–that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.”

That is what tech companies do with attention: Literally, our attention–through clicks, time spent on sites, other measurables–is commodified, priced, and sold. Now, this is how our politics is conducted.

For me, this is the story of the 2024 Election: If you watched the campaigns through traditional outlets–the conventions, the debates, the rallies, the mainstream media–the Democrats were winning. But, what the Trump Campaign understood better, which made the vital difference, is that the real attention of low-information, low-engagement voters isn’t held in these spaces: There’s a whole media ecosystem driven by social media content, podcasters, etc. that wield real influence.

It Was Cool, But The Voters Harris Needed Weren’t Watching

The task of understanding how to deal with the daily onslaught of Trump is understanding how to manage your own attention. Focusing on the day-to-day details of this controversy or that outrage actually obscures things. In fact, that’s what the authoritarian thrives on: By extracting your attention, you become distracted and exhausted so that eventually, as Winston Smith says in the last line of 1984, “He won victory over himself…He loved Big Brother.”

He Won the Victory Over Himself By Giving Big Brother All His Attention. “Nineteen Eighty-Four” by Michael Radford (1984).

This is where the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities (read it here) really is prescient, anticipating the melding of politics and media in the post-Industrial Age, written by the man best positioned to understand it. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” isn’t Dickens’ thesis: He synthesizes the paradox after a dash that directs you to his point:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way–in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Now you see it. It’s the best and worst of times at the same time depending on who you’re giving your attention to. On Chris Hayes’ MSNBC or Ezra Klein's podcast, it really is the worst of times: Democracy is falling apart, the Trump Dictatorship will evolve into some form of the Third Reich and Putin’s Oligarchy. On Fox News, and more importantly, the entire underground right-wing media ecosystem, it’s the best of times because President Trump is here to restore order after the worst of times under Joe Biden.

In other words, the “noisiest authorities” tell us how to feel through media ecosystems that create the vibes which infect our thoughts and influence our political actions. The joy and the outrage: Everything has to be good or evil in the superlative all the time to keep our attention.

Charles Dickens was, first and foremost, a media man. He began professional life as a Parliamentary reporter, and never stopped doing journalism throughout his prolific career as a novelist. In 1836 at 24 years old, he first gained fame with Sketches by Boz, a series of short biographical sketches of real people that read with Dickens’ characteristic detailed, witty prose. This merging of “sketched” non-fiction into fiction led to The Pickwick Papers, which catapulted Dickens into international stardom. Dickens’ timing couldn’t have been better: Lord Stanhope’s cast iron printing press produced more books, with more advertising, shipped widely on new railways.

Long story short, Dickens created himself as the world’s first “authorpreneur,” Using the “sketches” format, Dickens negotiated an arrangement that made serialized storytelling a viable business. In his deal with Chapman and Hall, Dickens “revolutionized nineteenth-century publishing, distribution, bookselling, author-publisher relations, copyright provisions, and of course fiction itself.”

Dickens’ weekly sketches commanded attention across the world, but because his publisher Chapman and Hall owned Pickwick’s copyright, Dickens didn’t reap the rewards. Charles Dickens never let it go, beginning Charles Dickens’ lifelong feud with publishers who didn’t seem to understand that they were profiting off the audience’s attention on Charles Dickens, which should be owned and monetized by Charles Dickens.

Dickens continued to publish serially, his fiction headlining weekly magazines that were, content-wise, mostly non-fiction journalism focused on social justice issues. Dickens’ fiction was headlining these subscriptions, so in the 1850s, he negotiated a deal to own 50% of Household Words, a weekly publication of un-bylined journalism that became a vehicle for Dickens’ serialized novels. He also assured that Household Words was “Conducted By Charles Dickens.”

Dickens, more than his publishers, grasped how technological advancements created more avenues for attention. Dickens wrote for a mass audience, and encouraged his publishers to distribute his work through media designed to reach different segments of that audience. He sold cheap pamphlets of his work, laden with advertisements that targeted the working class. He sold subscriptions to Household Words that targeted the middle class. With A Christmas Carol, he sold gold-flecked heirloom books. He started touring, earning a substantial income from live performances. He created his own small theater company (starring him in the lead, where he met his mistress).

The Author’s Picture of Original A Tale of Two Cities Pamphlets, Held at the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Forster Collection of Dickens’ Personal Artifacts.

To be clear, Dickens was terrible with money, overspending and overextending almost his entire life. But, better understood, Dickens spent money to gain attention, creating a public life in which he played the role of “Charles Dickens.” He understood himself as a brand, which he married to his writing style: Dickens wrote in “First Person Omniscient,” using “I” to tell a story as if he, Charles Dickens, is right there in your sitting room telling you a story. All the pieces in Household Words are “conducted” by Charles Dickens. Even his amateur theater troupe was “Under the Management of Mr. Charles Dickens.” In this way, Dickens created himself as an individual brand, designed to transcend his publishers in the same way that, say, Miley Cyrus transcended Disney and Hannah Montana.

The Tavistock House Theater Was Actually Dickens’ House Off Tavistock Square.

This active curation of Brand Dickens was the performance of Dickens’ life So, when the publishers Bradbury and Evans refused to print Dickens’ “personal statement” about his very shady divorce, he quit Household Words to self-publish and (mostly) self-own a new journal: All The Year Round.

Dickens bet on himself, believing that he, as a personal brand, was bigger than the legacy platforms most artists relied on. ATYR was, like Household Words, a middle-class publication mostly filled with social-justice journalism. Dickens launched ATYR with the first serial of A Tale of Two Cities right there on the cover, and it was the best of times for Dickens, with subscriptions so successful that he immediately paid off all the production costs and turned a profit of, in today’s dollars, about $100,000. Dickens was so petty that he sued Bradbury and Evans for the name Household Words, won the suit, and then titled it All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal. Conducted by Charles Dickens. With Which Is Incorporated Household Words.”

He Bet On Himself And Won Bigger Than Any Author In History: Dickens Launched His Self-Published Journal With What Became the Best Selling English Language Novel of All Time.

This is Dickens’ personal context when he wrote the first paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities. All his attention had been directed at his own attention. By this time, he was something like a proto media-mogul. He’d become a worldwide celebrity, toured the United States, invented modern Christmas, lobbied for successful Parliamentary legislation, founded philanthropies–most of his waking moments were spent getting and directing attention. Dickens also understood that his fame would outlast his life, that attention would be paid to it, so he fed his abandoned autobiography to his best friend and hand-picked biographer to curate his legacy after he died.

More than any other public figure, Charles Dickens understood that cultural and political influence ran partly through money, but mostly by being one of the “noisiest authorities” ginning up the day’s events in the superlative degree. Everything is evidence that society is wise/foolish, believable/incredulous, Light/Dark, hope/despair, everything/nothing, that we’re all going direct to Heaven or direct the other way. That’s how a media man moves copy! Nobody moved more copy than Charles Dickens!

A true testament to Dickens’ insight is that he recognized that what was happening to him wasn’t, in itself, new. Technology made it seem new, but really, he was experiencing newly amplified human nature. The methods and scale are new, but society has always been like this. The authorities are just a little bit noisier.

In the Enlightenment France that laid the intellectual groundwork for the Revolution, the noisiest authorities were Voltaire and Rousseau. They debated the nature of the Social Contract so vigorously that today, they’re buried opposite each other in the basement of Pantheon like they’re going to yell at each other forever. In the Victorian England that laid the groundwork for our modern Anglo-American political traditions, it was the formation of the debate between the political right and political left fought by Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine.

So, dear reader, if you think you live in extraordinary times, perhaps you do, but we’ve been here before. If you believe that political polarization is the product of the pernicious rewiring of our brains by social media, I think Dickens would say that technology only amplifies human nature, just as it amplified his celebrity in the Industrial Revolution. We’ve always been this way: The Times were like this in 1789, here in 1859, and whenever you’re reading my words in the future.

Deeper than that, Dickens also understood that his brand of journalism–substantive, social justice based–was competing for attention with tabloid journalism. Voltaire and Rousseau may be famous today because they were important thinkers who influenced the Revolution, but what actually consumed people’s attention in the Age of Enlightenment? What did your average Londoner consume other than the great debate between Burke and Paine?

Dickens has an answer for that in the third paragraph of Cities, which is key to his thesis. Nobody understood how tabloid journalism moved copy more than the most famous celebrity in England, much of it about him. So, he details a couple obscure allusions that would have been familiar to his readers, which illustrates his point.

Dickens references Wesleyan “prophetess” Joanna Southcott. Dickens mashes up some dates with some other obscure references to get to 1775, but here’s what his readers would have recognized: Joanna Southcott was an unknown servant who declared herself a Woman of the Apocalypse, came to London to sell “Seals of the Lord” to the “Elect” destined for heaven, and in 1814, as age 64, declared herself pregnant with the Messiah. She did, in fact, have some abdominal swelling, but it was a serious medical condition that led to her death. This gave rise to the Southcottians, a not-insignificant sect who believe that “Joanna Southcott’s Box” contains prophecies that will save England.

This is, of course, very stupid tabloid stuff, and true to form, Dickens chose a story that lasted well beyond his years: Through the 1970s, the Panacea Society lobbied for the requisite “24 Bishops of the Church of England” to open the box. In the Year of Our Lord 2024, the “prophet’s cradle” made news on the BBC.

The Lord Requires 24 Bishops To Open This Thing

More ridiculous is Dickens’ second allusion, the Cock Lane Ghost. The details aren’t important (I will post my personal videos from Cock Lane itself, telling you all about “Scratchy Fanny’s Ghost”), but here’s the high-level: William Kent’s wife died in childbirth, he lived in sin with her sister Fanny, she died of smallpox, the landlord Richard Parsons sued on the broken lease, Parsons lost, but then claimed that Fanny’s ghost haunted Cock Lane, and he started charging admission to see the house, developing a small cottage industry of freak-show curiosity in a narrow backstreet near Smithfield Market.

Again, this is all very stupid, but it led to over a decade’s worth of high profile lawsuits, public séances(!), Parliamentary investigations, including an on-site inspection by the famous politician Horace Walpole, and a personal documentation of a séance by Samuel Johnson.

The Author’s Picture of the Entrance to Cock Lane Before Investigating This Whole Scratching Fanny Thing For Himself

After announcing Southcott and Cock Lane’s importance in the 1775 public’s attention, Dickens tells us:

“Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.”

Dickens’ point: To move copy, the media gins up stupid tabloid non-stories, which distract our attention from actual stories, like the Declaration of Independence.

Both Dickens’ obscure allusions, which would have been familiar to his readers, have a common thread: Though obviously untrue and unimportant, the media amplification turned them into actual things that had to be dealt with by actual public officials. They took up important people’s attention!

Joanna Southcott attracted huge crowds across England, which had to be addressed by Church of England officials. Petitions to open her box took up time and energy during the Crimean War and World War I. The Cock Lane Ghost had to be dealt with by actual political luminaries of the time. England’s “most accomplished man of letters” Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literal guy who invented the literal dictionary, had to conduct an “investigative séance” of this nonsense, only to find out that the landlord’s daughter was hiding a piece of wood that made the “Scratching Fanny” noise.

This is how the paranoid style of tabloid journalism transmogrifies into conspiracy theory, which ends up doing actual damage in real life. The attention makes it real, and it has to be dealt with while the “mere messages” from colonial subjects are cared about only by “elites” who are trying to tell you what’s important. As somebody who spent two minutes reading about Melania’s meme coin yesterday, I can personally attest that Trump 2 is going to be the Cock Lane Ghost every day for the next four years.

So, if you think you live in the worst of times, that everything is dumb and driven by conspiratorial nonsense that’s distracting people from what’s really important: Well, Charles Dickens is here to tell you that it’s always been like this. He’s an Attention Merchant Of The Highest Order and knows how that game is played.

An Original Illustration of the Falling of the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities by Hablot Browne (1859).

But A Tale of Two Cities isn’t some sensationalized, exploitative version of the French Revolution designed to sell copies to the lowest common denominator. He’s here to draw your attention to important things, and for me, it provides a clear moral path for understanding revolutionary moments like ours.

Among literary people, Cities is low on the Dickens Power Rankings. Jeff Daniels in “The Squid and the Whale” calls it “minor Dickens,” but I think that undersells it. This is Dickens’ novel that speaks through time, and it’s the one that speaks most to this moment. We live in revolutionary times, and this book helps us process the what, how, and why of social upheaval. That’s what we’ll explore in our reading of the book.

If you’re looking to train your attention on something other than the second Trump Presidency, reading A Tale of Two Cities is a great way of understanding what we’re going through without getting ground down in the everyday. What they want is your attention, and looking to the wisdom of people who’ve been here before is a way of engaging the moment without letting it exhaust your most precious commodity, your attention.

So, welcome to this journey through time. I’ll see you back here next week, when we pick up in 1775 on the Dover Road to France, recalling a dead man to life.

Dickens Thought Bosses Should Be Shamed Into Better Wages, Where Marx Thought Workers Should Seize the Means of Production.

More than any pundit or political scientist, Charles Dickens provides the clearest frame for understanding modern politics. How you assess Ebenezer Scrooge is a good shorthand for one’s politics because Charles Dickens’s assessment of poverty is, in a profound way, the foundation for both sides of modern European-American politics.

Up front, it should be said that Charles Dickens, like Jacob Marley is dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever, about that. Old Dickens is as dead as door-nail.

And yet, Dickens really isn’t dead at all. Look at the community theater marquee in any English-speaking town after the American Thanksgiving holiday: There’s no entertainer more alive than Charles Dickens, except for another pop icon who resurrected her career with a Christmas hit after near career-ending bombs.

Christmas Hits Are Gifts That Keep On Giving (Until The Copyright Runs Out and They Enter the Public Domain!)

It’s more exact to say that the undead specter of Charles Dickens still haunts the politics of capitalism, like the three ghosts (plus Jacob Marley, who is visiting from an unnamed purgatory).

This exchange from one of the most polarized and consequential Prime Ministerial elections in British history, the 2019 contest between Tory leader Boris Johnson and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, illustrates the point. Like many things in British English, it doesn’t quite translate to call Johnson “Brit-Trump” and Corbyn “The British Bernie,” but you’ll grasp the basic American Conservative / Liberal worldview.

Towards the end of the debate, the moderator asks the candidates what they would gift each other for Christmas, and Corbyn says that Mr. Johnson–who, like a true man of the people, would show off his Classics-based education from Eton and Oxford by reading from The Iliad in its original Greek–”likes a good read.”

“So what I would probably leave under the tree for him is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and then he can understand how nasty Scrooge was.

It’s a great political zinger because it taps into something intuitively true: There’s no better way to explain nine years of crippling Tory austerity than by comparing it to the miserly Scrooge. It’s such a good line that Boris gives it a hearty laugh, and can only come back with gifting Corbyn “a copy of my brilliant Brexit deal.” Which, to be fair, is its own reflection of reactionary politics that struck something deep within the English psyche in its time and place.

The zinger also helps us understand the Right / Left divide in political thinking in modern Anglo-American societies: Why are the poor…poor?

Is Jeremy Corbyn right, that poverty is systematic, the result of a system designed to trap the working class in poverty so their continued exploitation will produce wealth for the capital-owning class? Or is Boris Johnson right, that the poor are lazy no-goods who would be less poor if they just got a job, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and showed their value in the capitalist marketplace?

This is why Scrooge endures. On the left hand, A Christmas Carol affirms the belief that the system is designed to exploit workers like Bob Cratchit, who shows up and works hard and loves his family, but is still at the mercy of capitalist goons like his boss, who lacks the basic humanity to pay him enough to let them live a decent life.

On the right hand, A Christmas Carol affirms the belief that if I’m an individually good and charitable person, then I am not morally culpable for the system’s evils because I am doing my part as a job-creator, and as an individual during the Christmas season, I do the right thing by giving of my largesse. Maybe there’s something wrong with the system, but everybody has the opportunity to succeed, and besides, my heart is in the right place, and that’s what matters.

So, if you don’t think about A Christmas Carol too deeply, it speaks to everyone, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum. This is why it’s evolved into an agreeably comfortable, civic-spiritual ritual.

But I would argue that A Christmas Carol is a work of Great Literature with a capital L, in ways that only reveal themselves upon close reading. Charles Dickens was absolutely not a Leftist, nor was he a Tory. Both sides try to claim him, but Dickens defies political classification because he’s an enigma: As Orwell observed, no writer has ever attacked his own country’s institutions with such ferocity and become such an institution himself. His worldview is the foundation of Anglo-American politics. There’s no politician, political scientist, pundit, anybody who has better described modern politics than Charles Dickens.

Let’s understand why. Our guide for this journey, like a Ghost of Christmas Past of English writers whose name we still recognize today, is George Orwell. In 1939, on the brink of World War II and after having fought in the Spanish Civil War (and having a near-death experience with Trotskyites, then settling down to a life in England with a rooster named Henry Ford and a poodle named Marx), George Orwell wrote a long essay about the most famous English novelist.

So let’s step through Orwell’s essay to help us understand why Dickens pretty much explains politics, and how all this is inextricable from Marx and the origins of Communist theory.

Dudes Rock, English Literary Icons Edition

Unless you thought I was overreading Dickens’ relationship to class consciousness and Marxism, Orwell opens his Dickens essay with an anecdote about Nadezhda Krupskaya, the wife and revolutionary partner of Vladimir Lenin, saying that he walked out of Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth because of its “(intolerable) middle-class sentimentality.” Fair enough, and this is indeed the most potent and lasting criticism of Dickens. Not only did the Bolsheviks believe it, but Oscar Wilde said about The Olde Curiosity Shop, “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

So, no, Dickens was not a “proletarian” writer. He was a social justice advocate who used his considerable stature to campaign against obviously barbaric practices like the death penalty. But as Orwell says, Dickens never really wrote about the working class, and when he did, they were often pitiful objects or comic relief Cockney buffoons, the Victorian novelist’s version of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Or, they were criminals, like the gang in Oliver Twist who would have felt at home in The Wire^.

Rather, Dickens’ stories are middle-class: As Orwell says, Dickens’ “real subject-matter is the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on–lawyers, clerks, tradesmen, innkeepers, small craftsman, and services. There are very few agricultural or industrial workers to be found.”

So, Dickens was not a socialist, or in Orwell’s words, “the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies.” Dickens pitied the working class, and he well understood how the existing order exploited them. As Orwell says, Dickens “attacks the law, parliamentary government, the education system, and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places.” He never really suggests that the system should be overthrown, or suggests that “the economic system is wrong as a system.”

You can see this in A Christmas Carol: He wrote this book in 1843, and nowhere in this story does Dickens suggest any of the political reforms championed by the liberal bourgeoisie in the revolutions of 1848, which were already being advocated in the literature of the time. Dickens also never hints at any of the working class reforms demanded by the artisans and factory men on the barricades in 1848, who were the grandchildren of the sans-culottes working men of the French Revolution, and the forefathers of socialist and communist revolutions to come.

Really, even though Scrooge has an individual epiphany that he should treat his employee better, Dickens never suggests that the system itself is the problem. In fact, the story ends with everybody in their proper place, but Bob Cratchit got enough of a raise to cover his son’s healthcare, and the family got a goose from the boss. That’s pretty much it.

Orwell is right: No wonder Vladimir Lenin was disgusted by Charles Dickens.

Unknown Photographer Of Lenin and Krupskaya Leaving “The Cricket on the Hearth.” (1922). No Stars for Dickens, Did Not Like, Too Bourgeois, Not Enough Class Conflict

Here’s where I’d like to leave Orwell for a moment to explain what, for me, is one of the most fascinating things in modern history:

In October 1843, both Charles Dickens and Friedrich Engels were in Manchester, England, witnessing the worst horrors of the Industrial Revolution.

One wrote A Christmas Carol. The other wrote Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, which Karl Marx would later use as the basis for Das Kapital.

This is where A Christmas Carol becomes more than a parable about why your family’s health care shouldn’t be tied to your employer, and why it’s a great work of Literature with a Capital L:

Read more

John Leech’s Illustration of Marley’s Ghost Confronting Ebenezer Scrooge for the Original 1843 Publication of A Christmas Carol. On the Right, the House that Richard Jones, London Tour Guide Specializing in Dickens, Identified as the Likely Model for the House Scrooge Inherited from Jacob Marley.

This guide will:

1) Provide a conceptual framework for understanding A Christmas Carol, and

2) Dig into the details to flesh out this deeper understanding.

My framework for A Christmas Carol is, admittedly, a bit speculative—but not without a factual basis. This framework helped me capture Dickens’ message and the mood:

Scrooge is in Purgatory.

Purgatory

In medieval Christian and later Catholic belief, Purgatory is an intermediate after-life space where souls are purified before entering heaven. Purgatory doesn’t exist in most Protestant beliefs systems: Martin Luther called Purgatory “unbiblical” and, more or less, a way for corrupt Catholic priests to sell indulgences. In Lutheranism, there is a scripture-based “in-between” space called “Hades,” but it’s not where sins are purged from the soul.

Over time, Dante’s vision of Purgatory came to define the idea, especially after Michaelangelo virtually canonized The Divine Comedy by including scenes in the Sistine Chapel. The Divine Comedy isn’t just Dante’s Inferno–the Inferno is just Part I, where Virgil guides Dante through the circles of Hell. Purgatorio is Part II, where Virgil (and, later, Dante’s muse Beatrice) guides Dante through the Terraces of Purgatory, where souls are bound for a certain time to do a certain punishment, the length of which is determined by the severity of their sin and the sinner’s level of contrition.

Conceptually, Purgatory is very different from Heaven and Hell. In Dante’s vision, Inferno and Paradiso are eternal punishments or rewards, so there is no passage of time. Purgatory, however, is time-bound—part of the purification is feeling the passage of time. Purgatory is also a physical imprisonment, confined to the Seven Terraces of Purgatory.

Why seven terraces?

Because souls in Purgatory committed one of the seven deadly sins, which betrayed true love in your time on Earth. You do your punishment in Purgatory, cleansing your soul of Wrath, Envy, Pride, Sloth, Lust, Gluttony, or Greed, and you emerge from the Terraces at the top of the mountain ready to enter Paradise.

Perhaps because I’ve taught both A Christmas Carol and The Divine Comedy, Dante’s influence on Dickens seems obvious: A Christmas Carol, like The Divine Comedy, is a story in a condensed time frame where a sinner is guided by a ghostly figure in a tri-partite structure to deeply interrogate the nature of sin and the true meaning of Christianity.

However, the only scholar I’ve found who has written on this is Professor Stephen Bertman at the University of Windsor in a 2007 article “Dante’s Role in the Genesis of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol” from Dickens Quarterly in 2007.

Professor Bertman deep-dives into evidence of Dickens’ knowledge of Dante, that certain books were found in Dickens’ libraries at his homes–-but most intriguingly, we know that the most prevalent translation of The Divine Comedy in Dickens’ time was by Henry Francis Cary, an assistant librarian in the British Museum, when a “young Dickens was frequenting its reading room as a cub reporter intent on enlarging his mind.”

There’s no proof of the two’s meeting, but considering the circumstances, it seems very likely that, even if they did not meet, Dickens would have been familiar with his work on Dante. Dickens was extremely well-read, and when you consider that:

1. Very specific lines from Scrooge are very similar to lines in The Divine Comedy,

2. The similarities in the physical descriptions of Satan and Scrooge, and

3. Dickens employs the same metaphorical structures to convey the same ideas about sin and punishment and redemption,

It’s very likely that Dante’s Purgatorio deeply influenced Dickens’ conception of A Christmas Carol.

Though Dickens was not a Catholic, he was also not a doctrinal Anglican, and was deeply influenced by canonical writers who worked in the Catholic tradition. Dickens was very aware of his own legacy, consciously trying to put himself on this top shelf of Legendary Writers. “A Muppet Christmas Carol” even makes this a joke!

So, look, if the best of all A Christmas Carol adaptations literally puts Dickens next to Dante, then we can too.

Narrator

In the Preface, C.D., as he signed his books, says,

“I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.”

Here, Dickens establishes two things: First, this is a GHOST story, intended not to scare or scold, but to haunt pleasantly. So, dear reader, no matter how awful this first part is, all will be well in the end.

Second, it is I, your “faithful Friend and Servant,” one Charles Dickens, that will be your guide. This is important.

A Christmas Carol is written in something like “First Person Omniscient,” where he, Charles Dickens, is the narrator of the story.

This was not just a literary device, but an essential part of Brand Dickens. Dickens was deeply involved in the business of publishing, fighting with his publishers his entire career. So, Dickens built into his style an identity that was unique and portable across platforms. When you bought a subscription to his literary magazine, Dickens didn’t want you to experience a Chapman and Hall publication as much as he wanted you to feel like Charles Dickens is there, in your sitting room, sharing a story with you.

This personal connection was not just Dickens’ way of telling the story, but his way of building a relationship with his readers. Thus, his writer’s voice is much better understood as a script, which is why Dickens, who wrote before cinema, is still so adaptable. Indeed, later in life, Dickens made most of his money performing his own scripts based on his books–-almost like the literature was created for the performances. He basically invented the book tour, if not the very idea of the “lecture circuit,” and it was great business.

As a literary matter, if you find Dickens hard to slog through, you are not alone. Dickens is best enjoyed aloud, and that’s why A Christmas Carol works so well on the stage, where a Dickens stand-in, like Gonzo in A Muppet Christmas Carol, performs lines from the text. Dickens considered himself an actor, and he wrote for professional actors to perform. He published serially, where his works were read aloud in pubs and ale houses–-performed by the dockmen who could read and loved to ham it up.

Dickens’ omniscient narration is very important to his structure: Dickens’ stories jump from place to place, like a Baz Luhrmann film where the camera can be backstage at an opera houses, fly out of the window above the great city, and swoop down to find the man walking the outskirts of the city. Dickens very much wrote cinematically, with deeply descriptive visual passages, atmospherics that’s like hand-written cinematography, and a narration camera that–in this story, literally flies Scrooge across England to see the effects of poverty on the people.

Gonzo in “A Muppet Christmas Carol” and Charles Dickens, Photographed by Herbert Watkins in 1858. They Both Performed the Role of “Charles Dickens.”

The Opening

There’s a lot to cover on the first page because Dickens lays down a lot of context: He basically gives you the point of the story upfront, then starts the narrative. In his first paragraphs, Dickens often uses unusual punctuation that directs you to his point. Here, Dickens opens A Christmas Carol with:

“Marley was dead: To begin with.”

That colon: Is important. Dickens needs you to know that Marley is DEAD. This is a ghost story, it involves the supernatural, it is spiritual. Scrooge is not imagining Marley, there’s no dream-sequence literary prank here. Dickens wants to establish the religiosity of the story: Thus, Marley is dead as a doornail.

“Dead as a doornail” is a funny phrase that extends back to Shakespeare’s time. Nails used to be handmade and very sturdy, often repurposed from project to project over decades or even centuries. Door nails would hold together wood from both sides of a door, so the nail would be driven all the way through, bent near the tip, and then hammered into the door like a staple. Thus, the nail cannot be repurposed for another project, it doesn’t have another life. It is dead.

The history of “dead as a doornail” phrase sets up the joke in the second paragraph:

“The wisdom of the ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the country’s done for.”

Dickens often made this joke, that England is old and stodgy and traditional and dark, our practices don’t make sense, everything is inconvenient–-and if we change anything, the country will fall apart. This is Dickens expressing English conservatism, in the classic sense.

The third paragraph requires a bit of speculation. What was the relationship between Scrooge and Marley? Obviously, they were partners, and there really isn’t any hint of anything beyond that. We’ll see later, there’s some suggestion that Marley was older than Scrooge, and yet, the firm’s name was “Scrooge and Marley.”

Dickens does his most famous literary move, the long paragraph of Repetition. Here, Scrooge is the “Sole” to Marley: the sole executor (listed first), sole administrator, sole assign, sole residuary legatee, sole friend, and sole mourner. Marley had nobody else.

Is this why Scrooge sought him as a partner? Did he forge this partnership with an older man for the potential inheritance? We know that Marley also left Scrooge his house, which even in 1843, was valuable City of London real estate, as we’ll discuss. And, we will discover that Scrooge is very much afraid of debt. There’s very little else about the nature of the relationship, but it seems like Scrooge set himself up with a partnership for the money, as opposed to marrying Belle for love, who we will meet in Stave II.

The Author Taking You Into Newman’s Court, the Likely Location of Scrooge & Marley’s

Allusion to Hamlet

In Dickens’ original handwritten manuscript, he crosses out a large part of the end of paragraph four. Declan Kiely, the former curator at the Morgan Library, which owns Dickens’ manuscript, writes in his introduction to the “Original Manuscript Edition” of A Christmas Carol that

“the ghost of Hamlet’s father is introduced, leading to a digression concerning the character of Hamlet that Dickens seems to have immediately recognized as superfluous and potentially distracting from the scenario he was establishing.”

I disagree. If we understand A Christmas Carol as influenced by Dante’s Purgatory, then the allusion to the ghost of Hamlet’s father makes perfect sense. In Hamlet, the ghost tells Hamlet that he is:

“Doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires, till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze they young blood.”

That is…Purgatory: the spirit from beyond, warning of how sins in this world will doom you, for a certain term, to punishments until your crimes are purged and burned away.

Hamlet was written around 1600, toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I. Her father Henry VIII separated England from the Catholic Church and created the protestant Church of England, whose tradition denies the existence of Purgatory. Shakespeare was writing in a time of doctrinal confusion: Are priests supposed to… not teach Purgatory now because the king wanted a divorce?

In the play, Prince Hamlet was sent to college in Wittenburg, the home of none other than Martin Luther, who tacked up his 95 theses eighty-three years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. Within Hamlet himself, part of his spiritual conflict is this very sudden change in doctrine: Prince Hamlet is being raised as a Protestant king, but he seems to have a Catholic soul: Not just his fixation on guilt, but his acceptance of the idea that his father’s spirit must be released from Purgatory.

Thematically, Dickens’ fiction fixates on guilt, forgiveness, and absolution–-as a writer, he is drawn to Catholic themes of Christianity much more than Protestant. In a Dickens novel, you have to make things right in this world to earn any sort of forgiveness. Nowhere does he suggest that the human act of baptism or the mere acceptance of God into your heart is any substitute for making wrongs right.

That’s why this allusion to Hamlet’s father opens the story: Dickens always worked towards Shakespeare’s reputation, so it makes sense that he would establish Marley’s ghost as something out of Shakespeare. Don’t take my word for it: Look again at Gonzo-Dickens on the shelf at Scrooge’s schoolhouse: The Muppets got this too.

The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father: Haunting His Son’s Soul to Earn His Way Out of Purgatory.

Scrooge is as Cold as Dante’s Satan

Next we get our first glimpse of Scrooge, a

“squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.”

Sinner is the key word, which emphasizes Dickens’ set-up that this is, above all, a Christian story. Also notice how cold Scrooge is, not just in personality, where “no beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him it was o’clock,” but how physically cold the “cold, bleak, biting weather” was.

This, again, is the influence of Dante: In Inferno, Satan isn’t engulfed by hellfire, but encased in ice up to his waist. Satan is cold, in the words of Dante scholar Rachel Jacoff, “the deepest isolation is to suffer separation from the source of all light and life and warmth.”

Think of every movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol you’ve ever seen: The tall buildings of the very center of the City of London shadowing out the sun, the fog settling into the narrow streets between the banks and counting houses, the small fires built in alleyways to provide small warmth, where this dark cloaked, shriveled man walks the urban streets with, in Dickens words:

“no eye at all, is better than evil eye, dark master!”

This is Scrooge, all alone in the empty Christmas Eve streets of London, towards the end of the Little Ice Age, when the Thames froze solid every year, until the pollution became so bad that it changed the composition of the water.

In this context, the “city clocks had only just gone three–it had not been light all day,” and

“the fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest the houses opposite were mere phantoms.”

With Dickens, the fog is always moral. In every Dickens story where the London fog sits on the city, expect the banality of evil. Not firebreathing revolutionaries, but the evil of lawyers, priests, schoolmasters, and moneylenders. Inside Scrooge’s office, the clerk’s fire had one coal–-much of the London fog of this time was smog, the constant burning of coal is how London became The Big Smoke. The smoke from a freezing fire is precisely an image from Dante.

This is not to say that Scrooge is Satan, exactly, but: He takes on one of the few jobs that the Bible namechecks as evil, a Moneylender. And, he commits one of the worst of deadly sins, Greed, that betrays his true love: Belle, his girlfriend who we’ll meet in the next Stave. Like Dante’s Satan, there’s nothing colder and darker than alienating yourself from love, and for Ebenezer Scrooge, that includes his family.

Arthur Rackham Illustration of Scrooge’s London from the 1915 Edition of A Christmas Carol.

Why Has Scrooge Alienated Himself From His Family?

In walks Scrooge’s nephew Fred, “A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheery voice. In Stave II, we will learn that young Ebenezer was hated by his father, but his sister Fan convinced him to let Ebenezer come home for Christmas from boarding school, probably for good. But Fan also died giving birth to Fred…we will get to all of this in Stave II, but for now, it’s enough to know that Scrooge’s nephew just wants to connect with what little family he has, but doing so would force Ebenezer to confront his sadness and anger about the loss of his sister.

Bah Humbug!

This is when we get our first Bah! Humbug.”

Today, almost any use of “humbug” alludes to A Christmas Carol. But the word was prominent in the 1700s, even used as the verb “humbugging” to describe jokes and tall tales–there was even a play called The Humours of Humbug, featuring the character Harry Humbug. But over time, humbug became a political insult, describing “frauds on the public.” That new salt tax that they said wouldn’t raise the price of food? The people have been humbugged. The lawyer who charges you for unnecessary court proceedings? He humbugged you!

By the 1830s, humbug was applied widely to lying, deceitful politicians–especially Members of Parliament. Lord Kearsley’s speech about how much he cares for the poor? That’s humbug.

“Humbug” was in such common usage during Dickens’ time that his readers would have immediately grasped that Scrooge is saying to his nephew that Christmas is a fraud upon the public, and he wants no part of this dishonesty.

Which is why Scrooge tells his nephew, after his speech about the Christmas spirit, that

“I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”

In the Dickens-verse, this is one of the worst insults you can levy. As a teenager, Dickens learned to write as a reporter for The Mirror of Parliament, which led to his lifelong belief that politics could never solve social problems.

To Scrooge, what else is humbug?

Marriage. When Scrooge asks him why he got married, his nephew says, “Because I fell in love.” For Ebenezer, that’s “the only thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas.” Again, this is why Scrooge is alone: He couldn’t commit to Belle, the reasons for which we’ll explore much more deeply in Stave II.

Scrooge’s Company

Now that we’ve spent some time inside Scrooge’s office, what, exactly, is his business? In the 1840s, Scrooge and Marley’s office in the Cornhill area of the City of London was home to several finance-related operations. A few blocks away sits The Bank of England and Mansion House, the real centers of power and wealth. We are about thirty years past the defeat of Napoleon, which elevated Britain to global supremacy. Thus, Dickens wrote Carol at the rise of the “British Century,” Pax Britannia’s control of the seas, nothing on the globe happened without the British touching it in one way or another.

It was here, in this tiny square mile of the City of London, where nearly all of world finance was moved. Right here in Scrooge’s London was where wealth was invested in the British Raj of India, the colonization of New Zealand and other islands in the Pacific, the occupation of Egypt to eventually build a canal that would halve the shipping time from the Far East, the “great game” of European domination waged against Russia, and the Scramble for Africa began.

It was also here where the wealth extracted from the people of those lands was laundered into the accounts of the British aristocracy and its investors. Literally, Scrooge’s London is also where Mr. George Banks worked, paying 17 Cherry Tree Lane and the services of his nanny Mary Poppins with plundered wealth invested in the Fidelity Fiduciary Bank.

However, Scrooge was not a banker on that scale. Rather, Scrooge seems to be a best-in-class, but still small time moneylender, perhaps the equivalent of a payday loan shark. This was during the time of the debtors’ prisons, where debt was criminalized and people of all classes could be incarcerated for owing private entities money.

As noted above, Dickens positions Scrooge as one of the worst sinners in the Bible: the usurious moneylender. The only time the Lord used the whip was to drive the moneylenders away from the Church.

Jesus Cleansing the Temple of Moneylenders. Not Unrelated: Scrooge McDuck.

Scrooge’s Politics

In his conversation with the men of charity, Scrooge reveals his politics, which Dickens draws from a specific source whose influence is still felt today. It’s unclear whether Scrooge’s contempt for the poor drove his choice of profession or vice-versa, but Scrooge’s contempt for the poor is core to his being:

“Are there no prisons? And the Union workhouses, are they still in operation? The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour then?”

The men of charity say, “People would rather die than go there.”

“If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population”

This line is a direct quote from the works of English economist The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, whose work became known as the “Malthusian Trap”: The idea that increasing a nation’s food production would, eventually, lead to a decrease in living standards because the resulting population growth would lead to food shortages.

For Malthus, this created a spiritual problem: If population growth thwarts social progress, it’s imperative for a nation to impose standards of virtue on its people. Being poor and hungry must be the result of individual vice and wastefulness, not national policies or macroeconomics.

Not that Malthus didn’t have views on economic policies: He thought the Poor Laws created inflation, which hurt the virtuous well-off, and he supported the Corn Laws, which taxed grain imports and spiked the price of bread. If the poor died because they couldn’t afford food, well....

...they should have avoided all the vice and wastefulness that put them in this situation. And if that led to mass death, no need to let that sit on your conscience, they’re just the “surplus” population. Their own vice and wastefulness dictated their own fate, and they would be judged accordingly by God.

Malthus was controversial in his own lifetime. In “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” Malthus said that Rousseau’s views on income inequality and romantic individualism defied the mathematical logic that population increases exponentially while food supply only increases linearly.

Malthus also beefed with William Godwin, the utilitarian and anarchist philosopher who was married to early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose daughter later became Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Godwin was an early proponent of utilitarianism, but Malthus thought “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” would lead to famine.

This is the man that Dickens used as a model for Scrooge’s politics: The poor are poor because they lack virtue, and if they die, well, get on with it because the surplus population is taking food from the virtuous wealthy.

Thomas Robert Malthus, One of the Great Assholes of 19th Century Economic Thought, Whose Ghost Still Haunts Our Politics Today.

The City of London

After the men leave, Dickens shows us the scene outside, and in classic Dickens faction, “the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links.” With Dickens the fog is always moral, and he makes clear that what’s about to happen to Scrooge isn’t just about his individual acts, but about his politics as well.

Here, Bob Cratchit asks for Christmas Day off, which Scrooge reluctantly relents to. When Bob leaves, he slides down Cornhill 20 times before walking home. Cornhill is an actual hill, a small hill, neighborhood just past Mansion House that Bob could have sled back in the day. But, and this is a detail that Dickens leaves out: Bob Cratchit’s walk home would take about one hour and thirty minutes.

The Cratchits live in Camden, a borough most known for its punk scene in the 70s and 80s. In the 1840s, though, it was a working class neighborhood far away from the city. Dickens himself lived there when he was little, during a time when his father was racked with debts. There’s a blue plaque commemorating Dickens’ residence there, which was almost surely the model for the Cratchit house.

Bob Cratchit’s Commute.

So, while Bob is setting off on his walk to play Blindman’s Bluff, Scrooge walks two minutes to the pub. Scrooge sees ragged men and boys warming their hands by the fire, he walks by the church, down a narrow alley that’s still there today, and you can imagine the frozen fog of A Christmas Carol settling into the alley before Scrooge takes his “melancholy dinner in his melancholy tavern.” This tavern, by the way, is still there: The George and Vulture, which hosts various Dickens groups for beers and dinners.

The Author’s Short Video Showing Scrooge’s Route to His Melancholy Tavern.

Marley’s House

After Scrooge takes his dinner, Dickens gives us some rather intriguing details about Scrooge’s deceased partner, Jacob Marley. Scrooge, apparently, inherited Marley’s house, which is tucked into a mews in the City of London. At the time, this would have been a very expensive piece of real estate.

This suggests that Marley had money, perhaps came from money, but had no family, or at least any that he would leave an inheritance. And yet, Scrooge’s name was first on the company door. The house is big enough that Scrooge leveraged the extra rooms to rent as office space. The basement was rented to a wine merchant to hold his casks. In Scrooge’s sitting room, Dickens details an old fireplace, “built by some Dutch merchant, long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the scriptures.”

The Dutch detail is key because it tells us that this house was once owned by a very rich merchant, perhaps from the Dutch East India Company from the Dutch Golden Age in the 1600s, when the Dutch Republic ruled the seas, dominating trade routes, the Atlantic slave trade, and extensive colonial ventures the world over. The stairwells were so wide you could get a hearse up it broadwise. Dickens is very much aware of the influence of empire on this space.

This is a serious piece of real estate. There’s even a disused bell “that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building.” The bell would have been used to summon servants, but Scrooge, apparently, is too cheap to employ them, and so he takes his little saucepan of gruel alone, no one in this enormous house.

When Scrooge sees Marley’s face on his door knocker, Dickens says that Scrooge

“had not bestowed one thought on Marley since his last mention of his seven-years dead partner that afternoon.”

Whatever happened to Marley, it was traumatic, and Scrooge reacts to it the same way he reacted to the son of his dead sister: Shutting himself away from the world. Ebenezer Scrooge has suffered traumatic losses in his life, and for me, that changes the traditional perception of Scrooge as just plain old greedy:

He’s suffering from trauma—which the Ghost of Christmas Past, like some proto-Freudian spirit, will bring from Ebenezer’s repressed subconscious into his present world.

Marley’s Ghost

“Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it.” Scrooge sits in his cheap darkness, “not a man to be frightened by echoes.” “Echoes” is one of Dickens’ favorite metaphors, often employed to suggest that the distant past is now finally catching up to you in the present. Thus, Marley’s Ghost finds his way through the heavy door to Scrooge, after double-locking himself in.

This is where we see more influence of Dante. Thus far, Dickens has described the City of London has a tiny, enclosed space encased in frozen fog, lighted only by small fires and gas lamps, in those hours on Christmas Eve when everything shuts down, as if we’re suspended in an alternative universe, and begin to really feel the passage of time before church, dinner, and gifts.

And so the ghost of Jacob Marley, body transparent, but otherwise dressed as he was in life–carrying a heavy chain made for

“cash-boxes, key, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.”

In Inferno and Purgatorio, each sinner’s punishment is a metaphorical representation of the sin itself, so the punishment is a perverse re-enactment of that sin on loop. Murderers stand in a river of boiling blood, hypocrites wear robes that glitter on the outside but are weighted with lead underneath, that kind of thing.

That’s exactly what Dickens does with Jacob Marley: In life, a moneylender who burdened people with usurious loans, metaphorically chained to their debts; in death, he is burdened to carry the weight he once put on others, Marley’s chains made more heavy by the padlocked places where he held their money.

The ghost tells Scrooge:

“It is required of every man, that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide. And if that spirit goes not forth in life it is condemned to do so, after death. It is doomed to wander through the world, oh woe is me!--and witness what it can no longer share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to Happiness.”

Notice the similarity to how the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father introduces himself:

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid

To tell the secrets of my prison house,

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,

The key phrase is “certain term.” In Hell and Heaven, the spirits do not feel the passage of time because the punishments and rewards are eternal. In Purgatory, however, the passage of time is part of the suffering that purges the soul of sin and prepares it for Paradise.

Shakespeare likely had not read Dante because The Divine Comedy had not yet been translated to English. Even though Shakespeare is clearly processing the Catholic / Protestant divide on Purgatory, there’s little evidence of The Divine Comedy’s use of metaphor to represent sins: The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father is not held in chains, and there’s no other metaphorical representation of the King’s sins in his appearance.

So, Dickens could not have drawn solely upon Shakespeare for his construction of Marley’s Ghost. The extensive metaphorical description of the Ghost’s chains and lockboxes as a clear metaphor for his moneylender sins—this is much more reminiscent of the depiction of souls in each Circle of Hell and Terrace of Purgatory.

And, Dante’s idea that sinners are confined to the places of their sin is a key piece of Scrooge’s later epiphany. Here, Marley says that:

“My spirit never walked beyond our counting house–mark me!--in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me.”

This is where Dickens’ description of the tall City buildings, narrow alleys, and frozen fog fits thematically. The claustrophobia of the City mirrors the lack of empathy of the bankers and moneylenders. If you never leave Cornhill and the shadow of the banks, you do not experience the misery those debts impose on people. Scrooge walked two minutes to his melancholy pub and finished his dinner before Bob Cratchit even got home.

This reflects one of Charles Dickens’ most deeply held beliefs: To really know what’s going on, you have to see it for yourself. Whatever else you can say about Charles Dickens, he got out there. Dickens was a notoriously compulsive walker. He walked the streets of London during the night. He would walk 20 miles at a time. He visited prisons, workhouses, cemeteries–-he was a journalist by nature, and he always went to the source.

So, Marley’s sentence is, apparently, carrying his chains to witness the poverty and misery he spreads. The man who was chained to his desk in life is forced to walk unceasingly in death, to see the world beyond his office. The lesson he has to learn is that:

“Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.”

For Marley, this lack of empathy corrupted his soul, which is why he’s here to visit his partner: Part of his sentence in Purgatory was simply to sit next to Ebenezer and watch him scribble debts in his ledger:

“I have sat invisible beside you, many and many a day…..that is no light part of my penance…to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate.”

Marley then tells Scrooge that he must endure visits from three spirits, without which, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.”

Marley’s ghost walks to the window, and Scrooge looks out: He sees “the air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, moaning as they went.” Scrooge knew them all, these dead souls all wore chains, linked together “like guilty governments.” These specters then fade into the mist, the fog returns, and Scrooge falls asleep, with time-bound appointments with the spirits.

Right: Gustave Dore’s Illustration of Canto 24 of Dante’s Purgatorio, Where Gluttonous Souls Gather Around a Tree of Fruit They Cannot Eat. Left: John Leech’s Illustration of the Trapped Spirits Outside Scrooge’s Window at the End of Stave I.

He Couldn’t Commit to a Ring, a House, and Kids: Ebenezer and Belle, Looked Upon by Old Fozziweg in A Muppet Christmas Carol.

For me, one of best passages in all of Dickens is Belle’s break-up with Ebenezer Scrooge. Read in its 1843 London context, the passage deepens Scrooge beyond just a greedy miser: His unwillingness to commit to Belle has a cold, …

Read more

Living Literature’s Guiding Light: Supreme Court Justice and Musical Theater Nerd Ketanji Brown Jackson, Seen on the Right in Her Broadway One-Night Only Appearance in “& Juliet.”

Part One. The Origin Story “Living Literature”

"Living Literature" is the culmination of my 25 years inside the high school classroom and the courtroom. As I've transitioned from teaching my own classes to training teachers on how to teach, I've thought a lot about why we read and teach literature:

Revitalizing the Humanities is Essential for Saving Democracy.

“Living Literature” is an ongoing project to rethink the reading and teaching of Literature. For casual readers, this will be me guiding you through great works of Literature for your enjoyment, that if you invest the time in a Great Book, I will help you get the most out of it. The point is to be fun, like a book club led by your favorite teacher.

For teachers, this is about the teaching of Literature. For over twenty years, my rather non-traditional career was, nonetheless, spent almost entirely inside the classroom with students. In this laboratory, I developed a particularly critical thinking- and historical thinking- based methodology, which I grounded in theories of Constitutional Law, to bring the Great Books of the Past into the Present. To do that magical thing they tell us we should be doing, but then get really mad when we actually do it: Make Literature Relevant For Our Students.

There’s multiple strands to this, which I will bring together into, hopefully, a methods book for teaching Humanities in the Age of AI. For now, I’ve adapted all this into a curriculum design and teacher coaching practice, focused on infusing intentional rigor into the teaching of Humanities.

With that, let’s go on a journey to understand how Literature Lives.

The Problem With Teaching Literature in American High Schools

If you’ve ever read a book that really changed you, that helped you find your purpose, understand this:

The Standardized Testing Regime actively discourages high school teachers from creating that experience for you.

Why?

High-stakes standardized testing creates a teaching of literature that's designed to obscure how literature helps us understand the present. It flattens literature into boring exercises about “textual analysis” to help you “find the author’s purpose.”

Great teachers can still make books come alive, but it cuts against our training and incentive structure, and there’s virtually no guides for teaching teachers how to make literature “relevant.” Because the tests have to be “standardized,” we teach you to interpret text in a one-dimensional way designed lead you to the “correct” answer. We’re taught to help you find the author’s purpose, not yours!

This has been the dominant mode of literary interpretation since the 1920s, when the Humanities abandoned its Liberal Arts roots and adopted the methodologies of Modernism and the Scientific Revolution. Combine that with the fact that since at least the 1990s, nearly all investment and energy in secondary curriculum has been directed at STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Thus, the entire practice has become so stagnant that, frankly, the Humanities haven’t developed a great answer to the question, “What is the point?”

This gap is what Living Literature will try to address, from how the Humanities teach more rigorous critical thinking skills than STEM fields, how the cultural and philosophical “soft skills” are actually the employment skills of the future, and how Humanities is the essential discipline for a democratic society.

Living Literature will take literature seriously as an object worthy of study, applying historical thinking and other critical thinking skills to use literature not just to understand the past, but to comprehend the present and think about the future. I will define and flesh out the methodology in future posts. The point of this article is to articulate exactly why the Humanities Are Taught Like This, and a Brief Glimpse Into How We Can Do It Better.

Honestly, The Best to Ever Do The Job. We’ll Explain Why.

They Tell You How to Think: Law School Actually Teaches Lower-Order Critical Thinking Skills Than the Humanities

I began professional life in a rural Southwest Missouri high school as a sophomore Language Arts teacher and a high school gifted program coordinator. As part of gifted certification, you dig deep into theories of learning. Gifted training asks you to think about thinking: When we say “critical thinking,” what exactly do we mean? I studied Bloom’s Taxonomy and used the little Verb Wheel to create rigor in my classroom….but I was just some high school teacher, and when you start out in this profession, you can begin to internalize the deficit narrative our society imposes on teachers.

So, when I left education for law school, I thought that this would be where I would really learn how to think! That’s what they tell you!

What I found was that, compared to studying literature and teaching kids explicit critical thinking skills, legal reasoning is actually quite formulaic and, truth be told, very limited. You learn a rule, you apply the rule to the facts, you reach a conclusion: The IRAC Formula!

This is pure analytical reasoning, which, on Bloom’s Taxonomy, is a lower-level critical thinking skill. Legal reasoning does get more complex, but mostly, the methods are divorced from the complexity of the historical, moral, and ethical dimensions of literature. This is intentional: As documented by Dylan Penningroth’s Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights, legal educators literally edit out racial and other social context from cases reprinted law school textbooks, presenting “The Law” as if it’s an objective, abstract thing wholly separate from its social and cultural context.

This is how they teach you “what the law is.” These rules exist outside of classism, racism, sexism, all the '-isms. Then you apply the “relevant” facts to this abstract, apolitical concept—which, because the concept is abstracted from social and cultural context, the power dynamics of classism, racism, sexism, etc. aren’t actually “relevant.” Those ground rules laid, after a series of arguments, the judge makes a decision based on pure reason.

Obviously, this isn’t how the law works at all, but that’s mostly how it’s taught. It’s vital to the prestige of the profession that The Law is objective and reasonable, that it floats above social context, cultural power dynamics, economic conditions, forms of discrimination—otherwise, it just begins to look like the grubby business of politics dressed up in suits and robes. I mean, that’s why they wore wigs!

The Author on a Charles Dickens-Themed Study Abroad Trip With High School Students, in Front of Stanley Ley on Fleet Street in London, Trying to Figure Out If I Could Pull Off the English Barrister Look

Constitutional Law: The Humanities of Law School

Constitutional Law is the closest that law gets to the values-based complexity of philosophy, history, or literature. But even then, the two current dominant schools of Constitutional thought, Originalism and Living Constitutionalism, still seek to “objectively” say what the law is, without creating a values-based framework of what it should be. Still, Con Law was the only course I recognized from my teaching career.

No joke, it was Charles Dickens who convinced me to leave my law job with a district attorney and return to the classroom. I spent most of my day deciding who goes to jail and who pays a fine and who gets their case dismissed. In short order, I came to understand myself as a legal functionary facilitating a debtors’ prison, like a minor character out of Bleak House or Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist.

There often wasn’t a lot of judgment involved–mostly, people’s fate was based on their ability to buy themselves out of mistakes. Justice was arbitrary, or as Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble observed, “the law is an ass–an idiot.” And I felt being a lawyer was making me an idiot.

Turns out, the real smart people stuff was what I was doing, teaching literature to high school kids. So, I decided to go back to the classroom, and to understand my idiosyncratic journey, the timeline is crucial:

I began teaching in 1998, before the passage of No Child Left Behind and the onset of intensive training in teaching to standardized tests. In fact, I hardly got any training at teaching literature at all: Mostly, I took a methods class from a college professors, and in my practicum and student teaching experiences, my mentors mostly said, “Here’s how to assess writing, and the content of these novels is up to you.”

When I left teaching for law school in 2004, I was just beginning to get trained in Standardized Tests. But, truth be told, I was much more influenced by my critical thinking skills training in Gifted Education, along with a love for movies when I reviewed movies for an early online magazine.

I went back into the classroom in 2009, right after the Great Recession financial system crash. Long story short, I ended up in a private college preparatory academy with a bent towards the liberal arts—where we explicitly did not teach to high-stakes standardized tests. That was part of the point of private school: the Standardized Testing Regime and “Accountability” are for, you know, kids in those schools. No need for that here. Literally, never once in my twelve years in private school did I encounter anything like the State Standards that are the basis for your existence in public school.

I taught sophomores in a kind-of “Pre-AP” class, but mostly, I was left alone to develop my practice however I wanted, while my friends and colleagues in public schools were grinding through “text-based passages” and the like. So, because I worked outside the system for twelve years, I developed a Critical Thinking Skills curriculum that reimagined and, humbly, rewrote Bloom’s Taxonomy into a scaffold to build rigor into my course. And, armed with my training in Constitutional Law, started developing a methodology for teaching literature while, again, my friends and colleagues were shackled by the Standardized Testing Regime.

That’s where Living Literature comes from. Now I’ve moved back into working with public schools, and, being a small town kid, this is my truer self. This project is an attempt to bring some of what I learned outside the system inside the system, especially at a time when our nation’s History and Literature teachers are facing literal death threats for simply doing their jobs.

Statue of James Woods Green (1922), First Dean of the University of Kansas School of Law, From Which I Graduated in 2007, Here Memorialized on Mount Oread For All Jayhawks From Here to Eternity, Pontificating Some Pretentious Nonsense to This Knee-Breeches Lad About the Majesty of the Law or Whatever.

Part 2. Why We Teach Literature Like This: Modernism and the Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution’s Logical Outcome Was Standardized Tests

When I returned to the classroom and started preparing students for AP exams, I began studying the history of education itself: Basically, how did this become the way we teach literature? Why do they ask us to divorce literature from its historical and cultural context, except to the extent that we need to understand snippets, passages, and the “author’s purpose”?

As with a Legal Education, Advanced Placement and other standardized testing regimes are based in scientific thinking that evolved from the Enlightenment.

In short, the mission is to make the study of Humanities objective. Just like the law is nothing more than a battle between competing rational analyses.

To oversimplify, Modernist thinking (I will use this term in the T.S. Eliot sense, explained here) attempts to “scientificalize” all disciplines into methods of finding the single “correct” answer. This is the grandchild of the 18th and 19th modes of thinking that led to the Scientific Enlightenment (itself a grandchild of Copernicus, Newton, etc.), which gave us the first science labs, the scientific method, and new scientific disciplines. This is when, for example, curious and enterprising professors and students (and “hobbyists”) created the practice of Anatomy. This involved, among other methods, digging up recently dead bodies were from graveyards in the middle of the night in the London suburbs, taken to “operating theatres,” and pumped with electricity to be reanimated in an effort to discover the origins of life.

So, what does this have to do with teaching literature in the 21st Century?

Everything, as it turns out.

Literature and philosophy had been at the center of a traditional liberal arts curriculum, where moral inquiry was the primary purpose of higher education. You read the Western canon of great writers and thinkers to understand how to live the purposeful life: Socrates, Plato, Homer, Augustine, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and other dead white guys. A Socratic Seminar might pose the question, what’s the point of digging up these bodies and pumping them full of electricity to discover the origins of life? Should we be doing this? What are the moral hazards of unleashing a technology into the world without fully understanding the potential consequences?

The Author’s Picture of the The Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret in London, The Last Remaining Operating Theatre Where They Attempted to Reanimate Corpses With Electricity. Also, It Should Be Federal Law that Frankenstein Be Taught as the Foundational Text for Every STEM Program in the Country.

By the early 1900s, this mode of inquiry didn’t really fit the Modernist influences that transformed academia. Scientific inquiry taught us to search for objective truths using evidence and reason. Philosophical inquiry was too soft and squishy and “subjective” for the modern world. It doesn’t provide answers; it mostly just leads to more questions.

So, how do you teach literature in a world in which intelligence is measured by your ability to find the “reason”-based single objective answer?

Solve For the Author’s Purpose.

The Modernist movement imported scientific-type methods into interpreting literature, called “New Criticism.” New Critics tried to answer the question: What’s the “correct” interpretation of a text?

Because there can only be one, objective answer, there’s only one way to deduce the answer:

Reasoning Yourself To The Author’s Intent!

Solving For X: The Scientificalization of Literature

The most prominent example is T.S. Eliot, who was the Modernist literary critic (and prominent anti-Semite, which we will discover later, is not unrelated) in addition to poet and playwright. Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems” perfectly exemplifies this mode of thought: According to Eliot, Hamlet fails as a work of art because Shakespeare never makes clear exactly what’s wrong with Hamlet!

Hamlet is so elusive and confusing and slippery–so open to interpretation–because Shakespeare himself must have been confused. Obviously, based on the text, Shakespeare never really worked out what Hamlet’s problem is. So, Hamlet fails not because Hamlet can’t figure out what’s wrong with him–but that the author Shakespeare never explicitly tells us, the readers, what’s wrong with him.

Obviously, Both Shakespeare and Sir Laurence Olivier Would Fail AP Lit Because They Didn’t Explicitly Articulate a Concise Thesis That Clearly States Prince Hamlet’s Dominant Emotion.

Why is this a problem and make the play fail? Because, according to New Criticism, the only legitimate way to interpret literature is to find the author’s intent. You use the tools of literary criticism to decode the text, and that’s your answer. It’s literary interpretation as algebra, as if you’re interpreting the text in the same way you isolate X when factoring equations. You can’t use historical context, author’s biography, critical lenses, human virtues–-none of that, no more than you would use “historical context” to solve a quadratic equation.

Eliot calls this the “Objective Correlative,” which, in the very phrase itself, distills the “scientific,” “reason-based,” objective mode of Modernist thought. In his Hamlet essay, Eliot defines the objective correlative as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”

Right there in the definition he tells us that literature should be a “formula,” the algebra-fication of values and humanity that are articulated by art.

Now you can see the endpoint of this mode of Modernist thinking: teaching literature with Standardized Tests.

Standardized tests have to be…standardized. It’s very hard to standardize tests around the values-based inquiry of liberal arts because there’s many possible answers, open widely for debate. In fact, the debate is mostly the point.

That won’t do for standardized tests. There can be no debate over the algebraically-derived, single correct answer, which you must objectively arrive at based on specific rules of interpretation that are the logical outcome of reason. After all, the point of standardized tests is to measure your intelligence, and how can we know if you’re really smart if you don’t know how to solve for the objective answer? All this subjectivity stuff isn’t rigorous.

T.S. Eliot When You Develop Your Own Interpretation of Hamlet.

So, if the only way to interpret literature is “finding the author’s purpose”, that gives you X, and X is what we need if we’re going to standardize these tests. You think your own individual assessment matters?

Now you see why we teach literature like we do. Especially because the rise of high stakes standardized testing puts our jobs on the line, we teach Modernist, New Criticism, solve-for-X style literary analysis. Small passages, completely divorced from context, put in front of kids like little chemical equations to balance. And bigger questions about the novel as a whole are, mostly, expressed as “What did the author intend?” broad questions.

This is why it’s often awkward for literature teachers to try to “make the book relevant for our students.” It cuts against the way our study guides are designed, our assessments are constructed, the whole approach that’s been ingrained in us–with little or no explanation for why we teach like this. Especially now, when AP is nearly ubiquitous for most college bound students.

Trying to Figure Out How to MAKE THE LITERATURE RELEVANT FOR YOUR STUDENTS When Your Job Relies On Them Answering “Author’s Intent” Standardized Test Questions.

Part 3. Towards a New Methodology: Adapting Living Constitutionalism to Teaching Literature

Ok, so now, let’s return to Constitutional Law, the practice of law that’s closest to Humanities. Long story short, for my dissertation, part of my Conceptual Underpinning was based in Justice Stephen Breyer’s “Active Liberty” concept, so I had to read a bunch of really boring Legal Theory books about all this. But, this training seeped its way into my teaching, and my practice really did change as I intentionally began to apply these interpretative methods into my own reading of Literature.

Ok class, here we go: The dominant modes of Constitutional interpretation are, oversimplified, Originalism and Living Constitutionalism.

Originalism: How Conservatives Fix Meaning in the Past

Originalism is the idea that the Constitution means whatever the Founding Fathers intended when it was drafted. This school of thought was popularized by, and made dominant by, Antonin Scalia. There’s tons of writing on how unpersuasive, if not outright dishonest, this methodology is, so I will shorthand my view here:

There are different strands of Originalism. On the Supreme Court, for example, there’s Neil Gorsuch, a Textualist Originalist who believes that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is by decoding the words themselves. As such, Gorsuch literally cites the Merriam Webster dictionary in his opinions. In his concurrence in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), he understands “discrimination” in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act by looking at a Merriam Webster dictionary from 1964, and then decodes the rest of the phrase with further dictionary definitions.

However, most Originalists think they function like historians, but, truth be told, without the complexity of actual historians. In reality, students who are really good at DBQs on the AP Test (Document-Based Questions, where students synthesize their analysis of various primary and secondary sources to answer a question) are engaged in more rigorous thinking than most Originalists. Their opinions are composed as if they’re taking us back to 1793 in a time machine, definitively showing us the objective, inarguable truth of what the Founders intended.

But unlike real historians, Originalists seek simple, definitive answers, rather than grappling with ambiguity and complexity. Rarely do Originalists offer competing interpretations based on what words meant in context, or explain the fierce disagreements about the interpretation of Constitutional passages at the time they were written. Typically, the Originalist tone is that, if you can’t plainly state the Founders’ intent, you’re simply not being rigorous enough to understand that What The Founders Meant. You’re imposing your politics on the inviolable words of the Founders.

So, if you’re an actual historian or humanities scholar and say, no, look, you can’t definitively say what Thomas Jefferson might have thought about the Constitutionality of AR-15s, they will say: Nope, cite some contemporary Federalist Papers, and perhaps do some sentence diagramming.

A For-Real Diagram of Justice Scalia’s Grammatical Interpretation That Was, Yes, Actually This Detailed in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), Which Established for the First Time in the Republic’s 200+ Year History an Individual Right to Bear Arms.

In this way, the Originalist Constitution was written on stone tablets, like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, and the justices’ methodology is to bring that meaning down the mountain to us lay people below. The Founding Fathers not only are sacred, their word is LAW.

This is, basically, author’s purpose style interpretation. Modernists use the same tools and modes of inquiry, locking meaning in the past. This is why Conservatives, who seek to conserve institutions and ways of thinking in the past because they are enduring truths, generally think along these lines. The truth lies in the past, which is what it should be today and on into the future.

Conservative Legal Theory, Abridged.

Living Constitutionalism: How Progressives Evolve Meaning into the Present

The “Living” Constitutionalists tend to be political progressives. To them, our notions of morality and ethics and rights and “they way things ought to be” evolve and adapt over time. Still, there are principles and values that endure and can be applied to the past, present, and future, which are the foundation for our judgments.

But to understand the literature of the past, context is important: When reading Antigone, what was happening in 441 BC Greece helps us understand why the Athenian priest Sophocles wrote the Theban Trilogy as a crisis of faith in the gods. And then we bring those ancient truths and understanding through time up to the present—bringing the moral questions of Antigone to bear on the corpse of Michael Brown lying in the streets in Ferguson, St. Louis County, Missouri.

We ask ourselves, how is today like it was then? How is it different? How does this help us understand what we should think about today? What can the unnerving sight of an unburied corpse tell us about the power relationships in a society?

Theater of War in Brooklyn Imagined Antigone in the Suburbs of St. Louis, Creating a Communal Experience Not Unlike the Catharsis of the Greek Theater. They Eventually Brought This Religious Experience to My Home State Here in Missouri.

Living Literature’s Guiding Light: Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

The name "Living Literature" is inspired by Justice Stephen Breyer's "Living Constitution" theory, in which the Constitution is a document that evolves and adapts to its current environment like a living organism. The objective isn’t to banish “author’s purpose” and textualist style analysis from teaching, but to use it as simply one tool in a larger toolkit of interpretation–often, the beginning point.

This mode of Constitutional interpretation is the intellectual project of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who actually rejects the term “Living Constitutionalist” for her writing. She claims to be an Originalist, reclaiming that word from the conservatives who seek to return the law to the time of the slaver Founding Fathers.

She claims “Originalism” because her extraordinary opinions trace the law from its founding to today, in an intellectually rigorous and wide-ranging pursuit of meaning that brings the wisdom (and shortcomings) of ancient documents into the modern world.

In my view, no matter which label Justice Jackson chooses, what she really does is explain how an ancient document from a very different time, under a very different context, can and should still have relevant meaning today. Its enduring principles are fixed at the time of writing, and the path forward is grounded in those values, interpreted in factual, historical context. This is how a fixed document can still govern a union that seeks to be “more perfect” than it was in 1793. We have to understand its founding principles as in constant tension and evolution to be able to survive. This is the only way to make a democratic republic endure.

Even if, I imagine, that Justice Jackson would reject the title, Living Literature is going to attempt to do for Great Books what KBJ is doing for the Equal Protection Clause of 1868. And in doing so, we will try to give teachers a framework for approaching literature in the classroom that gives students the tools they need to think through the extraordinary challenges facing their generation today. In a future post, I’ll take Justice Breyer’s framework, season it with Justice Jackson’s methodology, and adapt it to a literature context.

No, This Is Not a Stretch: Justice Jackson Has Said That Musical Theater Has Influenced the Way She Thinks About History and Law, and She Has the Pipes for Broadway

Part 4. Teaching Literature To Create the Skills for Democracy

Freed From Standardized Testing, Literature is the Most Rigorous Discipline

The Living Literature project is animated by this idea: Studying literature is the truest way to understand society. To enlarge our sensibility, to understand why people feel and act the way they do. Reading literature is the practice of understanding the humans telling the story–not just the author, but the characters who leave the author’s control once the book is out in the world.

The reason why Humanities used to sit at the center of university curriculum is because, to understand literature, you have to understand how all the other disciplines bear on the actual human experience of people in a particular time and place. Humanities was the hub; every other discipline was the spokes.

In this conception, studying literature wasn’t a particular skill revolving around the parsing of text through literary devices—the study of literature is really about understanding how the social history of a place creates the conditions of the plot, how economics creates the conditions of the characters, how the understandings of the physical universe of the time influence the perceptions of the characters, how the geography of a place influences the relationships between people….and on and on, you get the point:

To really understand a work of literature in full, you need to be at least versed in all the disciplines of the academy, and a master of some beyond simply knowing what a synecdoche is or how the Petrarchan rhyme scheme is different from iambic pentameter.

Once we understand that, studying literature isn’t like, just your opinion, man. It’s the most rigorous of all the disciplines.

Robert William Buss, Dickens’ Dream (1875). This Kind of Knowledge Requires Curiosity About Everything.

Democracy Only Works When People Can Understand Others

But beyond academic concerns of intellectual rigor, studying literature requires you to develop empathy. It’s not the only empathetic discipline of course–but that’s what the Humanities is literally about, it’s right there in the name.

Even the AP Test helps you do this. The first thing you learn in AP Lit prep is how to identify the narrator. Who is this person talking to me? Of course, they’re a construct of the author, but the perspective is rooted in time and place, and you have to figure out why they see the world as they do. That requires you getting inside their head, in the same way the author has created this fictional head space that you inhabit when you read.

Not only do you have to understand how history, economics, language, science, and all the rest bear on their worldview, but you have to understand their personal circumstances–you have to understand relationships, motivations–those things that make us human. This sometimes involves psychological theory, like with the Freudians, but really, it simply requires you to bring your own human experience to the story. For comparison or contrast, we are all bound together by the experience of having a difficult family, unrequited love, complex siblings–you know, life stuff.

Once we put all of this together, what is the life, work, personal, and professional skill you’ve developed?

Empathy.

Done well, thinking deeply about literature develops the brain muscles to help you understand where other people are coming from. Why do they think that way? Why did they do that? What’s going on with them? The more you study literature, the more reflexively you can answer these questions.

Seriously, in what walk of life would the ability to synthesize all this information into a reasonable range of possibilities for why people feel and act the way they act–where would this not be valued above technical proficiency? Where wouldn’t this be a tangible, concrete, definable skillset out in the real world that employers pay top dollar for?

Beyond employable skills, the ability to empathize–to analyze the historical record and bring those values into the present, while really listening to your fellow citizens to figure out how to live together in this nation:

This is the foundational skill of democracy. It’s not STEM or the “employable skills” or the “market value assets.” It’s the skills developed through analytical history and literary interpretation. This is what matters most in our current moment.

This points to the inherent….irony?...contradiction?...tension?...of education in a democracy:

State-sanctioned independence.

In a democracy, education is the empowerment of the young to topple their elders and make something new. Truly wise elders have the humility to understand that our fate is to become the villain that the youth fight against to regenerate a democratic society. Truly wise elders do not cling to power until they die: They understand that you allow yourself to become the butt of the joke, and then enjoy watching the youth create The Next Thing.

For real, this is the purpose of education in a democracy (body-shaming aside.)

The Only Movie Teacher Who Understands the Democratic Mission of Education: Dewey Finn (Mr. Schneebly) Who Told The Kids That If You Wanna Rock You Gotta Break The Rules, You Gotta Get Mad at The Man, And Right Now, I’m the Man. Is Everybody Nice and Pissed Off? Now It’s Time to Write a Rock Song (Or Amend the Constitution)!

Who Controls the Past Controls the Present

If you don’t believe this, ask yourself: What is the epicenter of our current politically-charged culture war over schools? That’s right, it’s history and literature. Because those are always the most important components of education, no matter what the “jobs of the future” and “learn to code!” people tell you is the purpose of school. In the end, it always comes down to history and literature because these stories from the past are used to decide the present. Political actors understand that who controls the teaching of history and literature are who gets the first crack at teaching young people Why Things Are Like They Are.

This is why the 1987 English Coalition Conference, the largest and widest ranging summit of English teachers from elementary through college, themed their conference “Democracy Through Language.” The whole point, from Pre-K readers through PhD literary studies, is to teach citizens of a democracy how to understand each other so that we can negotiate how to live together in a nation. The National Council for the Social Studies also sees their mission as preparing citizens for democracy, and today articulates their purpose as quite literally “Safeguarding the Republic.”

These are the stakes, and truth be told, it’s the main reason authoritarian movements ban books, jail teachers, call us “groomers,” make our jobs so impossible that you quit, and defund history and the humanities: This creates the information vacuum they fill with their own propaganda, their own stories that justify why we should hate The Other, because they’re not us.

Part 5. This Really Is About Fighting Fascism: The Modernist Roots of Standardized Testing

Fascism is a Modernist movement whose methods for interpreting literature are the basis for remaking society in the image of the dictator. Standardized testing is rooted in the same racist and eugenicist ideas of Fascists. Seriously, the explicitly racist and eugenicist history of Advanced Placement, the SAT, and the rest of what would become the high stakes standardized testing regime is all right there. This is not an accident: The Fascists themselves developed and used these methods to further Fascism.

Mussolini and Hitler in Rome, 1943. If You Don’t Pass Their Tests, They Put You on a Train.

There’s a lot to all this, and if you want to deep dive into it, I cannot recommend more highly Roger Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler. Here, Griffin confronts historians who turned a blind-eye to the relationship between Modernism and Fascism by reducing their understanding of Modernism to merely aesthetics: “This architecture looks like modernism” or “This poem has modernist elements.” Griffith says this aesthetic is part of the whole point, which tries to construct a world that has collapsed into disorganized rubble and is being rebuilt by a Great Man. No wonder Mussolini and Hitler loved it.

This brief review by Marla Stone is a great summary of Griffin’s work connecting Modernism to Fascism. Basically, Griffin takes Modernist literary theory, art history, architecture, etc., and then imposes it onto the intellectual and political theories of Fascism. This shows how Fascists and Nazis not only adopted Modernist style to create propaganda, but used the “scientific” intellectual theory of Modernism to create a “one true answer” politics.

That one true answer? The Dictator.

That’s how Fascists “mobilized cultural and political modernism is the name of ‘the Nation’ and ‘the Race.’”

Remember early when I said that the most prominent Modernist poet was the antisemite T.S. Eliot? That’s not an accident.

Here’s how that intellectual project works:

Modernist literary theory–the theory we use to justify standardized test based education–says that there’s only one true answer. The job for the writer and reader is to reduce the interpretation to X.

So, if you’re an angry young German in the 1920s looking at your country’s physical devastation and economic degradation after World War I, you want an answer for why this happened and why your country sent you off to be probably be slaughtered in the trenches. Perhaps you could try to understand What Happened by tracing this back a century or so to the ongoing struggles between the Enlightenment-based French Republic and the Militarism-based Prussian Empire, and how the Fall of the Bastille gave rise to Napoleon’s conquests of Eastern Europe, triggering the slow-motion collapse of European Feudalism, eventually leading to the Second Empire of Napoleon III and the Franco-Prussian War, which ended with Otto von Bismarck signing a treaty in the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles establishing the German Empire, because that room had paintings glorifying the French conquest of German lands under Napoleon, and so that’s where France eventually humiliated Germany after World War I, making them sign the Treaty of Versailles on the Hall of Mirrors.

Now ask yourself, why did all this happen and what does it mean for rebuilding Germany in the wake of our great defeat? Are these punitive, society-destroying peace treaties just the expression of nationalistic chauvinism, and perhaps the way to break this cycle is through rebuilding and rehabilitation?

Or, you might want a simpler answer. Obviously, since our great nation cannot be at fault. There had to be some shadowy, state-less people who aren’t quite, you know, one of us, even though they live among us. They secretly control everything: the banks, the media, the universities—all of it.

Solve for X = The Jews. They’re to blame for everything.

So, to make our great nation great again, we need to isolate that pernicious variable in our national formula. And eliminate that variable.

You can hear this mode of thinking in Nazi’s own words: The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

The Treaty of Versailles by Joseph Finnemore (1919). We Can Ask Hard Historical Questions About How We Got Here, Or We Can Just Blame The Jews.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Fascists, Nazis, Stalinists, and other authoritarians love this mode of Modernist thinking. It trains people to think how the dictator needs you to think: Very clear and simple story, one definitive answer based on what the author tells you the answer is. What is the Law? Whatever the “author”itarian says it is!

This is also why 20th and 21st century authoritarian movements love technology and science and “data.” Modernism gives them a way to “scientificalize” their bigotry in “evidence” and “reason.” I’m not a racist, I’m just looking at all this data objectively, so it’s not me who is saying that Black Americans are less intelligent than whites—that’s just what the evidence reveals as objective truth.

Technology and science and “data” are deployed to distance you from your own values that, on some level, you must know are evil. So, you use the language of STEM that’s “objective” and “rigorous,” making “moral inquiry” and “ethics” simply subjective, non-rigorous opinions unworthy of being elevated to the same intellectual plain as this “data-driven evidence” of Why Things Are Like This.

This is what Mark Twain meant when he wrote in his autobiography that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” That’s how “respectable” bigots launder oppressive, dehumanizing ideas into respectable institutions of power, whether they wear robes in courtrooms or lab coats on university campuses or suits in the halls of Congress. They dress up gutter bigotry with Race Science charts and graphs. Literally, that’s what gave us The Bell Curve. It’s how the literal Nazis justified racism:

The Nuremberg Laws Codified This “Scientific” Chart of “Racial Ancestry” Into the Law to Decide Who was “Too Jewish” to be a German. (The Answer: Three Jewish Ancestors in the Direct Family Tree.)

That damage isn’t just inflicted by authoritarians; my friends and colleagues in the STEM-emphasis, vocation-oriented “school should only teach you how to get a job” movements have weakened democracy by convincing entire generations of Americans that teaching History and Humanities are “useless.” This is why nearly every policy discussion in education going back at least two generations must be “based in data.”

They have convinced educators and education policy makers that without data, what you’re advocating isn’t real or important: If you can’t measure it, we shouldn’t be teaching it. So it gets sequestered as an “unserious” part of school, bereft of funding, focus, and often, just basic respect from policymakers, parents, and your own colleagues in the “serious” subjects.

And worse, if you teach one of those useless subjects, you’re not really a professional. You’re less than actual professionals, like lawyers and doctors and architects and teachers of important subjects. Educators aren’t even close to the Second Best Job. Just imposing your opinions on students. Indoctrinating them!

You can’t think about teaching values-driven, moral and ethical inquiry in the Humanities. History should only teach “the facts,” which completely misunderstands what history actually is.

So, yes, I actually believe that the past two generations of Data-Driven Education Reformers are also responsible, in part, for the erosion of democracy. I actually believe that the extreme focus of money, time, and focus on STEM Education has had catastrophic consequences for the health of the nation, and made us collectively unable to confront the big questions of our era. And that Standardized Tests, in the way we give them today, prime people for authoritarian government.

Since A Nation At Risk was published in 1982, the subsequent reactionary Education Reform Movement has opened up a void in the national narrative where the techno-fascists in Silicon Valley and “Unitary Executive”-ists in the government can insert their preferred stories to justify their own authoritarianism.

When the kids say, “These tests are fascist,” they’re not wrong. The origin of the SAT is literally rooted in racism and eugenics from the 1920s.

Just know this: Winston Churchill was not confused about the value of History and Humanities (even though he probably didn’t say “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” and is likely responsible for the Bengal Famine).

Winston Churchill Reviewing His Notes Over a Scotch-and-Water as He Decides How Kind History Will Be to Him Because He Is Writing It (Photo by N. Farbman for Churchill’s The Gathering Storm, 1949).

Part 6: Living Literature Applied: Charles Dickens and A Tale of Two Cities

This idea that Literature Lives from the past into the present and on into the future is why one of our first books is going to be the one with the most famous opening line of them all: A Tale of Two Cities. We’ll figure out how it could be the best of times and the worst of times at the same time. Hint: Charles Dickens was a journalist who knew how to gin up outrage to sell subscriptions. He also understood that if you think you live in extraordinary times, well, gentle reader, We’ve Been Here Before.

When he wrote Cities in 1859, he understood his times as an extension of the French Revolution of 1789, and he was also famous enough to know that his words would have meaning in the future, whenever his readers picked up the book. In other words, Dickens would say that the times in 1789 were the same as they were for him in 1859 and are largely the same for us here in 2025.

So, if you’re looking for a way of thinking about our current moment beyond our current moment–with the perspective that the outrage of the day doesn’t really tell us that much about why things are happening, that we need to connect emotionally and psychologically with people who have been where we’re at—that’s what we’re going to do with A Tale of Two Cities.

The Wisdom Contained Herein Is Immeasurable.

(Not Really, You Can Teach Sustained Critical Reading and Critical Writing Skills Within a Values-Based Framework, Guided By Assessments that Accurately and Reliably Measure Student Competency in Deploying Higher Level Critical Thinking Skills. If You Care About Saving Democracy Rather Than Obsessing Over NAEP Scores.)

There’s a great passage right before Dickens describes the Storming of the Bastille. In the chapter “Echoing Footsteps,” The Manette family, French expats who fled Paris during the tyrannical reign of Louis the XVI, are living a comfortable life in north London, in the middle of a newly-built Georgian square, where row houses surround a lush garden in which families often share meals and spend time together outside.

The family and some of their friends are in the garden, when a great storm comes. They hear the footsteps of all the people running to their houses, and Lucy Manette hears the echoes of her heartbeat as they scatter. She feels the heartbeat of her little girl, 6 year old Lucie. Her heartbeat, the heartbeat of her daughter, and all the heartbeats of the running people are heard together through this common experience of the storm.

Dickens says, “But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about little Lucie’s sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound, as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

Soon after, Dickens cuts the narration to the poor neighborhood of Saint Antoine in Paris, where a mob of revolutionaries is gathering to storm the Bastille.

The echo is a beautiful, defining image for Dickens: And, considering that A Tale of Two Cities is a historical fiction, the echo is something like Dickens’ idea of history itself. An echo is a sound, made by something in the past that happened somewhere else, travelling through space and time to us in our present time and our present space, and then leaves us to be heard in the future by others elsewhere.

In other words, our common human experience is interconnected across time and space. Those footsteps headed toward the Bastille will eventually be heard in London, with catastrophic consequences for the Manettes. The end of the book is something like a present-tense prophecy, but also set in the past.

Whatever is happening to us now, it’s because of the things that happened in the past, and the course we choose now will echo into the future. Yes, we live in extraordinary times, but people have always lived in extraordinary times, and it's the literature of the past that can help us cope with the present and create a better future.

This, for me, is how literature lives, and it’s the guiding idea of this project.

The Author’s Picture of Bedford Square, Where He Surmises That Charles Dickens Set the “Wonderful Corner For Echoes” in A Tale of Two Cities. We Will Go There, Spiritually, During Season 1 of Living Literature.

In its context, using “Electric Avenue” as a Donald Trump warm-up anthem isn’t just a nostalgia play:  It’s an aggressive appropriation of Black protest music designed to tame its original meaning.  For starters, Eddy Grant’s hit intersects:   

1)  The Brixton Riots of the 1980s in the bombed-out slums of southern London,

2)  “Operation Swamp 81” and the current-sounding but actually Victorian “Sus Law,”

3)   London Metropolitan Police abuses that eventually got their version of “Stop and Frisk” rescinded by Parliament, 

4)  The “Windrush Generation” of Afro-Caribbean immigration during the post- World War II liquidization of the British Empire,

5)  David Bowie making original MTV VJ Mark Goodman flop-sweat during the early days of basic cable,

6)  The most racist policy of the Theresa May prime ministership that cost her Home Secretary her job, and 

7)  The best street-vendor jerk chicken outside the Caribbean.

A little personal context upfront.

(The author on his first trip to Brixton, June 2016)

In the early 90s, I worked in the menswear department at Montgomery Ward, next to "Electric Avenue."  You remember the commercials:  the cheapest stereos and tvs in the mall!  I heard that song once every 20 minutes, a full dozen times during a 4 hour evening shift.  Just rockin' out while folding sweaters for $5.25 an hour, across from Electric Avenue.  

(The author in October 2024, in the West Bottoms of Kansas City, next to an abandoned warehouse with a Montgomery Ward Electric Avenue semi trailer that has to have been there for at least 25 years)

That kind of exposure ear-worms a song deep into your psyche.  So, on one of my first trips to London, I went to see the real Electric Avenue.  It’s not hard to find:  around the corner from the Brixton tube station at the south end of the Victoria Line. 

Exit the station, directly across the street, look at the lefthand wall in the alley, and you'll see the David Bowie Mural–this is a key detail we’ll return to.  Back at Brixton Station, exit, turn left, go one block, look up at the roof of the Boots Pharmacy, and you'll see the Electric Avenue sign. 

(That’s me after 20,000 steps in a very windy London on Electric Avenue, June 2023)

In the 1880s, this street was the first in London to be lit by electricity.  Long story short, over the century, Brixton became home to many Caribbean immigrants (still today, Brixton has one of the largest Jamaican populations in the world), many of whom migrated as part of the "Windrush Generation" after World War II.  The Windrush Generation was a huge migration wave from the West Indies, mostly people of Afro-Caribbean descent, moving to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other English-speaking realms.   They spoke English, of course, as a legacy of the British Empire, and that’s why today, the largest Caribbean festival in North America occurs every August in Toronto on the lakefront:  Caribana, one of the most colorful, chaotic parties in the western hemisphere.  

Taking us back to London, as part of the post-WWII unwinding of the Empire, the 1948 British Nationality Act granted Commonwealth citizens Right Of Entry to the UK.  The Windrush Generation mostly settled in Brixton, a neighborhood south of the Thames that grew up after the building of Vauxhall Bridge in 1809.  Brixton was bombed out badly by the Germans during the War, creating a neighborhood of substandard housing that eventually led to "slum clearances" in the 1960s and 70s.  The neighborhood had become one of the most multi-cultural in London, a combination of white working class and Caribbean first and second generations---with a reputation for being a music and artists colony because of the cheap and available real estate.

By the 1980s, racial tensions heightened, and the police began to employ the 1824 Vagrancy Act, the so-called "Sus Law,” which authorizes the police to arrest anyone for “acting suspiciously” with the “intent to commit an arrestable offense.”  Though this law dates to the pre-Victorian age, the concept is very similar to the 1968, judicially-created "Terry Stop" exception to the 4th Amendment.  By the 1980s, the LMP’s use of Terry Stop-style tactics had grown into systematic, aggressive targeting of non-white men throughout the multicultural boroughs of London.  

In the United States context, the LMP’s “Sus Law” tactics are largely indistinguishable from what later became known as “Stop and Frisk.”  This extreme version of Terry Stops were widely deployed as by the NYPD during the Bloomberg administration–-which were declared unconstitutional in 2013 because they disproportionately targeted Black and Latino men.  There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the NYPD learned “Stop and Frisk” from the aggressive ethnic profiling by European police, most notably in Brixton, Tottenham, and other London neighborhoods during the slum clearances.  

On April 10-11, 1982, things boiled over, and hundreds of London Metropolitan Police and young Black men fought in the streets of Brixton--mostly over the issue of aggressive policing.  The largest clash was called Bloody Saturday, though no deaths were reported.

Following the riots, the Thatcher government commissioned the Scarman Report, in which the Home Secretary appointed the very well respected “Law Lord” (basically, an appellate judge in the English system) Lord Leslie Scarman to produce a report on the causes of the riots, and recommendations for further action.

A self-proclaimed liberal, Lord Scarman oversaw official government inquiries into riots in Northern Ireland and the Red Lion Square riots by the fascist National Front movement.  But this was also a Thatcher era commission, and Scarman had upheld conservative policies in other inquiries in which he presided.  In short, Lord Scarman was a man to be taken seriously.

Scarman found that, yes, the Brixton Riots occurred in an environment of urban decline, and yes, racism was a primary factor that required “urgent action” to hasten “the very survival of our society.”  More precisely, he found that the Metropolitan Police’s “Operation Swamp 81” had resulted in the “spontaneous” riot, largely putting the blame on the police, not the protesters. 

Operation Swamp 81, ostensibly to combat “street crime,” took advantage of the “Sus Law” to stop, search, and jail thousands on the mere suspicion of violating the 1824 Vagrancy Act.  Remember, you don’t have to have actually committed a crime, but merely “act” like you “intend” to commit one–in the judgment of the officer.  Under the cover of this law, when the Metropolitan Police carried out Operation Swamp 81 in April of 1981, hundreds of plain-clothes officers flooded Brixton.  Not only did they stop-and-search citizens, but set up roadblocks and mass detention facilities.  There was no consultation with local authorities or officers, but reading the report, it feels like the Metropolitan Police carried out a para-military operation in the streets of Brixton.

This, dear readers, is what "Electric Avenue" is about.  This is why Eddy Grant said "Now in the street there is violence...no place to hang our washing."  The Windrush Generation from the colonies settled in a bombed out slum of south London, were largely unable to rebuild the neighborhood because subsequent British governments asked companies to stop recruiting Caribbean labor because it was "unsuitable," and eventually led to police riots.

But how did “Electric Avenue” itself become a hit?  In 1983, contemporary to the riots, Brixton’s most famous pop star, David Bowie, was the first white musician to openly confront MTV about its lack of Black musicians in this incredibly awkward interview with original VJ Mark Goodman. Whatever else is true about David Bowie, David Bowie grew up in Brixton surrounded by the Caribbean community, so he understood the inherent racism in MTV’s video rotation.  This context is still embedded in Brixton alleyways  The Ziggy Stardust Mural is right around the corner from Electric Avenue.

(My picture of the Star Man Mural in July 2016, 6 months after Bowie’s death. People were still laying flowers and writing him messages like this)

Soon after, MTV responded to the criticism by including more Black artists in its programming.  And what was one of the videos that became prominent in MTV's rotation, launching it as an enormous hit that still generates thousands in royalties?

"Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant.  Which he wrote after working at a theater in Brixton, then moving to Barbados, where the video was filmed.

If you take the long view of history, you might say Donald Trump's weird appropriation of Black music extends back to the sugar plantations of Jamaica, but maybe that's too much.  In the very least, the story is firmly entrenched in the history of the British Empire--here, appropriating Black protest music, then gradually taming it over the years until it’s so divorced from its original context that it loses its meaning in the popular, white-defined consciousness.

It’s a common thing, Black protest music getting worm-brained into your skull, not to express outrage at injustice, but to sell stereos.  Or get used as warm-up music by an 80s media guy turned aspiring dictator, promising mass deportations that will include the Americans of the Windrush Generation. 

In fact, deportation of longstanding Windrush residents and citizens isn’t new to Trump:  It was the biggest scandal of the Theresa May Prime Ministership, which eventually brought down her Home Secretary. 

In 2018, the Theresa May administration instituted what was informally called the “Hostile Environment Policy,” targeted specifically at the Windrush Generation.  Among other new burdens, it required longtime immigrants to prove that they resided in the UK before 1973, the last year of eligibility under the British Nationality Act.  The government expressly sought to create a “hostile environment” for Caribbean immigrants, hoping they would “voluntarily leave.”  Incidentally, Theresa May first announced this policy in 2012, around the same time as then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney articulated his “self-deportation” immigration strategy.

To this day, we still don’t know how many Afro-Caribbean UK residents were affected, but there were enough people detained, kicked out of their homes, denied benefits and medical care that Home Secretary Amber Rudd was forced to resign.  Passports were confiscated, and longtime Afro-Caribbean UK residents were denied entry back into the country, separating families across the Atlantic Ocean.  Eventually, the government rescinded the policy and instituted a compensation scheme, but very few people have actually received their money, and at least 23 have died before getting paid. 

If you stroll through Brixton, you’ll see a gentrifying London that’s representative of London today:  People from cultures the world over, increasingly priced out by rising real estate prices.  Visit Brixton Village, which is, yes, one of those outdoor markets increasingly popular in “emerging” parts of the city.  Still, Brixton retains much of its Caribbean flavor, and you’ll find great jerk chicken (pictured below!).  While you’re there, remember the victims of the Brixton Riots of 1983 and Eddy Grant, who memorialized the ongoing resistance out in the street of Electric Avenue.

“The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books” by The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch.

Horowitch’s article has, let’s say, concepts of a plan to explain why today’s college students lack the capacity to read full books.  The article is much like the elite college students it’s worried about:  It knows something’s wrong, but lacks the perspective, context, and historical thinking skills to figure out why.   

Now, you probably think that college students can’t read books because “everybody is always on their phones, grade inflation dumbs everything down, and kids don’t listen to anybody,” and sure, that’s a large part of it.  

But below the surface, there’s a more important story about how the standardized testing regime has, collectively, degraded our ability to think about “wicked problems”:  A catch-all term for the big, serious, thorny, complex, systemic issues, where every policy choice involves a series of trade-offs that require value judgments because “silver bullet” technocratic solutions don’t exist.  

This is where the Humanities excel:  Most complex problems cannot be data-analyzed into fix-all solutions, so real leadership requires historical thinking, cultural context, and moral reasoning.  You know, the types of things that aren’t on the test.  

Excelling on Standardized Tests Will Get You Into College While Diminishing Your Ability to Excel After College

Horowitz opens with Professor Nicholas Dames, teacher of Columbia’s “great-books” course, reporting that his students say “the reading load feels impossible.”  Crucially, he cites a conversation with a student who says that, in high school, she had only been assigned “excerpts.”  He concludes:

It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading.  It’s that they don’t know how.  Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to. 

It’s worth pausing on this point, which we’ll return to several times:  Students will read, understand, and apply longform critical thinking skills–if we give them the skills and the purpose.  

This isn’t a lame attempt to somehow make literature “relevant,” but to teach Humanities so that it develops the skills essential to tackling the world’s Wicked Problems.  There’s a reason so-called elite schools, that were founded mostly as leadership academies for the aristocratic class, grounded their studies in the liberal arts of Humanities and History.

Back to the article, Horowitz says there is “no comprehensive data” on students’ inability to read books, so she relies on interviews with thirty-three professors from, presumably, “elite” universities for her conclusion.  Fair enough, but the real question is why.

In search of an answer, Horowitz cites research saying that high schools teach fewer books, blaming the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and, later, the Common Core curriculum that ushered in the “accountability” era of high stakes testing.  

Horowitch explains that NCLB and Common Core “emphasized informational texts” and “short informational passages,” which “mimic the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests.”  The tests do not assess your ability to comprehend long, complex narratives, nor can they easily assess whether you can apply context to your understanding of those narratives.  And, in the age of accountability-based teacher evaluation, if it’s not tested, there’s “little incentive to teach it.”  

So, why did the NCLB and Common Core emphasize excerpts-based reading comprehension?  As Antero Garcia, a Professor of Education at Stanford and outgoing Vice President of the National Council of Teachers of English, says, the switch to “excerpts” (often called “passages” in test-speak) was “intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts.”

Follow the Yellow Brick Road:  Standardized Testing “Passages” Train You to Walk Pre-Determined Paths

To pick up where Horowitch’s article leaves off, let’s talk about the Education Reform Movement and the 21st Century Standardized Testing Regime.  Specifically, I want to explain precisely why the emphasis on “passages” is crucial to understanding why much school curriculum has, mostly, abandoned teaching longform writing–fiction, history, scientific, or otherwise.  

A little personal context:  I began teaching in 1998, teaching high school English in a small midwestern rural school, where I also became the Gifted Program Coordinator.  I earned a Master’s degree at one of the few Centers for Gifted Education in the country, which gave me a rare background in the explicit teaching of critical thinking skills.

As such, Garcia raises one of my longstanding gripes about NCLB and the Common Core:  The writers and developers of this curriculum largely do not understand, at all, basic critical thinking concepts.  

I do not want to recount the entire history of corporate-influenced ideas in education.  But it’s hard to overstate the extent to which NCLB and the Common Core reflect a technocratic worldview, over 50 years in the making.  For a comprehensive deep-dive into the roots and rise of the Common Core and the modern standardized testing regime, Wil Greer’s 2018 article from The Journal of Educational Foundations (free to download from the U.S. Department of Education) is a great primer.  Or, read about the outsized role the Gates Foundation’s money and influence played in the “Swift Common Core Revolution”, and here’s one of the best discussions of the Common Core’s failure, where even the guys who say “stay the course” have to admit that it’s done very little to improve education outcomes.  

Said another way, NCLB and the Common Core reflect what corporate business leaders think critical thinking is, mostly because they believe that data analysts are the smartest people in the room.  The problem is that they believe “critical thinking” and “analysis” are synonyms, but in reality, “analysis” is simply one type of critical thinking, and a lower-order one at that.

Analysis is, by definition, process-based thinking where you break a whole into parts to understand how it operates.  This is algebraic thinking, the rhetorical equivalent of solving for X.  Or, think of “analysis” like this:  When something doesn’t work, analysis is a trouble-shooting guide.  When something does work, analysis is a recipe.   

To explain how that type of thinking infects the teaching of reading comprehension, let’s apply this thinking to “passages” style reading questions.  SAT, ACT, and all other manner of reading comprehension tests present excerpt-based passages that ask for the author’s main idea.  This is almost purely analytical thinking, the reading equivalent of solving for X.  You use the tools of textual interpretation to decode the author’s meaning, which, under the rules of the test, is the only “correct” way to interpret the passage.

Now, let’s think about how the test itself is constructed:

Because the test has to be standardized to create a “correct” answer, which has already been determined by the test-writer, the questions themselves must be intentionally constructed like a road-map so the student can reach the single, unequivocable, “objective” answer! 

There’s very little for the test-taker to do for themselves.  In fact, “thinking for yourself” will only lead you off the path towards wrong answers!  To get the right answer, designed by the test-makers themselves, you follow the already-constructed path, like Dorothy down the yellow brick road to get the answer from the Great and Powerful Oz.

Standardized Tests Have Trained The Past Two Generations Of Students to Cower Before the Great and Powerful Oz

So, what does this teach students who have had this kind of thinking pounded into them–not just by SAT or ACT test prep in high school, but on a daily basis in nearly every part of the curriculum during the entirety of their schooling?

If you’re an experienced professional in your field, you have probably encountered this from a younger hire:  You give them a reading-and-interpretation task of some sort, or anything that requires independent problem solving–and it absolutely paralyzes them.  

They come to you and ask “Is this right?” or “Is this what you’re looking for?”  And you say, well, I don’t know, that’s why I asked you to read it and give me your insight.  And they’re completely bewildered, or as University of Virginia Professor of Chinese Literature Jack Chen says in the article, they “‘shut down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand.” 

It’s actually worse than that:  It’s not that they don’t understand the ideas, they have been trained not to have their own ideas!  Look at what these standardized tests drill into students:  There’s a pre-determined answer that is someone else’s answer, and whatever interpretation you might conjure up is not only irrelevant, it’s wrong.  You show how smart you are, you qualify and credential yourself for college and the workplace, not by having your own ideas, but by solving for somebody else’s X. 

And if you come back with the wrong broomstick, a tiny man behind the curtain, pretending to be an all-powerful demigod, yells at you through a microphone and blows red smoke in your face so that you feel shame for having failed. Or, if you’re a school administrator, you have to admonish students that because you didn’t do well enough on the tests to show enough Adequate Yearly Progress, as mandated by No Child Left Behind, that we’ll have our funding cut and get tagged as a “failing school.”

Real Problem Solvers Don’t Just Need Brains:  They Need Hearts, Courage, and Dog-Like Instincts Too 

Advanced critical thinkers can look at things from a systems level, within cultural context and with historical perspective to try to understand why things are how they are, with a values base that can imagine a better world.

This requires higher-order critical thinking skills like, say, “synthesis,” which compares different analyses, generating a new, original-to-you interpretation that makes sense of a bigger problem or a bigger narrative.  This is what scientists do when they generate “theories,” when economists develop “models,” and when artists find their unique voice.  

Now you see the problem:  Excerpt-based, information-driven “analysis” is a lower form of critical thinking than what we want people to do.  It’s easier to test and assess, but it doesn’t require sustained concentration, following a complex narrative, or historical or cultural context that would complicate the analysis with possibilities other than the pre-determined X.  

Synthesis is a higher-order critical thinking skill:  It’s a meta-analysis at the systems level.  Beyond analyzing data in isolation, synthesis requires qualitative analytical skills to try to find more human explanations for the data–and then you compare different analyses to try to uncover insights underneath that somehow unify the data.  It’s this combination of quant and qual, used in tandem, that generates original insights.  

So, how did this lower form of “analytical” thinking come to define the era of NCLB and the Common Core?  In the 1990s, a movement emerged around the idea that the purpose of education is, above all else, to create the future workforce to drive the economy.  

Thus, “education reform” needed to create curriculum and systems to “create the workforce of tomorrow.”    

How did that manifest in education policy?  

To understand the education reform vision, 1990s context is essential:  This was the beginning of the internet and the “dot com” boom.  The “jobs of the future” would require college degrees because we’d all be working on computers now.  The blue collar manufacturing jobs are all headed to Mexico.  No longer could you create a middle class life by working with your hands:  The road to the middle class passed through college.

What kind of curriculum would determine “college readiness”?   Well, one based on analytical thinking, assessed by rigorous standardized tests, administered by a system that held educators accountable for results.  

In other words, No Child Left Behind and the Common Core.  For over the last twenty years, high school curriculum has bent towards this kind of thinking.  The result?  Young people have been trained to read excerpts and can no longer follow full-length books. And they’re absolutely terrified of being wrong because that will disappoint you.

To be clear, I don’t think this is entirely true: I think students today are more aware and more worldly than ever, which is an undercurrent in the “culture wars” over book banning and curriculum since 2016. That said, as a teacher, you have to work really hard to build enough trust that they’ll believe you when you say, “The goal is for you to develop your own insights, based on your evidence-based analysis and a values-driven perspective that clarifies the situation for other people.”

That’s harder than solving for X. It can’t be learned through excerpts and passage-driven standardized tests. And as Professor Dames observed up front, they want to do this kind of thinking, but we have to understand what that thinking is, and also how to teach it. And that requires reading the whole book.