Nearly all Dickens' characters are odious or stupid - or both.
Most of the rest are fatally flawed or more or less anonymous victims.
Ralph Nickleby is an even more villainous Scrooge.
Everything is shabby, everywhere people are cold and desperate.
But it is all petty bourgeois, like the desperate clerks and minor officials of Dostoevsky.
No millwrights, carpenters, coachmen, miners, peasants, or common laborers.
No more than the Russian.
Yes, there is humor in his satire, and not always bitter.
Reading Nicholas Nickleby.
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