The University of Manchester has warned its students that an essay by Charles Dickens shows the author’s “racist views.”
Their warning discusses an essay that was co-authored by Dickens in 1851 that the university says “expresses racist views, particularly against Chinese people.”
The notice was issued to undergraduate English Literature students on the university’s “Victorian Rights: Victorian Wrongs” module.
The essay in question is titled “The Great Exhibition and the Little One” and was authored by both Dickens and poet Richard Horne. The authors argued that Western civilisation was economically, politically and socially superior to China.
The article accused China of “coming to a dead stop” after the Great Exhibition of 1851, during which an exhibition of traditional Chinese arts and crafts was taking place at Hyde Park Place.
According to a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Daily Mail, students have been encouraged by the university to discuss their worries with their course tutor if they are “concerned” about the views held in the article.
Critics have called the University of Manchester’s warning “historically illiterate.”
Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent labelled the comments made by Darwin and Horne on technological advancements a “self-evident fact.”
“Highlighting the economic and political superiority of the West in the middle of the 19th century was a self-evident fact,” he said, “as factually correct as the observation that today China’s economy is superior to that of the UK.”
“What we should worry about is not so much Dickens’ racist views but the historical illiteracy of the University of Manchester’s sensitivity police.”
A spokesperson for the University of Manchester said: “The University of Manchester supports and encourages the open discussion of challenging ideas, but to ensure that students can engage critically and thoughtfully with such material in its historical and cultural context, content notes are sometimes provided when learning material includes discriminatory language or other potentially offensive content.”
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