The Latter-Day Pamphlets lost Carlyle a lot of his more liberal friends, John Stuart Mill being the most prominent among them, and even some less liberal who were nonetheless aghast at his tone. One he did not lose was Charles Dickens, whom he had known since 1840. Dickens was no liberal where criminals were concerned and was no great believer in character change, as his novels demonstrate. The author of Oliver Twist could not have written Crime and Punishment. He shared Carlyle's opinion of the penitentiary system, even if he expressed his distaste with more humour in his fiction and less bile in his journalism. With the exception of Carlyle, it has been said, he was more reactionary than any of his literary contemporaries. This is true to an extent, but only in relation to inveterate criminals, the depraved and not the deprived. And this is true primarily of his later years: he changed his mind with changing times, as many of his contemporaries did, and with age, as most people do. As his arteries hardened so did his heart. He was a man of large heart and little consistency.4 He was, after all, a novelist, not a criminologist. That is why he is still read.

In his novels Dickens discoursed on the hulks, debtors' prisons, and the penitentiary system. His sympathies lay with neglected and deprived children, those who were put in prison cells for minor offences stemming from need or even ignorance, or street-urchins such as the Artful Dodger, who were seduced into a life and love of crime and exploited by adults such as Fagin, a villain not deprived but depraved, and an arch-corrupter of youth.