ANYTHING PEACEFUL

The Dickens You Didn't Know

JANUARY 10, 2013 by THE FREEMAN

You probably know Charles Dickens as the great Victorian writer who cast the entrepreneur as the villain and the miser. You know the Dickens who painted bleak pictures of poverty and child labor during England’s Industrial Revolution. But what if, in reading the complete Dickens, you got a more complete picture—both of Dickens and his world? What if the Dickensian archetypes were not the full story?

Indeed, what if we were wrong about what Dickens represents to the market and to entrepreneurship? What if what you “know” about Dickens were a few blown-up images and characters extracted from a sliver of his entire corpus of work and used as a bludgeon against the free market?

If you’re a literature buff and a market enthusiast, you’ll be delighted by Sarah Skwire in this lecture. She enlightens us about the Dickens we didn’t know. Enjoy.