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that prostitution, drunkenness, murder, arson, and revolution come into the world, not because prostitutes, drunkards, revolutionaries, and their kind are by nature viler than other human beings, and certainly not because they love darkness better than light, but simply because, as our social order is constituted, some members of it never do have a fair chance for their share of the decencies of life. I do not pretend that Dickens would defend all his criminals thus: certainly no such plea would serve for Fagin or for Bill Sikes. Nevertheless, this is unmistakably his teaching in The Chimes. Lilian becomes a prostitute because her soul is crushed by unrewarded toil; Richard, frightened away from marriage and domestic happiness by his poverty, sinks lower and lower into drunkenness and sloth until at last he revenges himself upon his betters as a revolutionary firebrand; Meg slays her child to obviate the possibility that she may live to follow in Lilian’s footsteps. And in every case, says Dickens, it is Society, and not these poor outcasts, that is to blame.

It was startling beyond belief in 1844, so startling that probably not very many people understood all its implications. If they had, the matter could hardly have passed of so quietly. For, on a broader scale, Dickens here lays down precisely the same principle which George Bernard Shaw was to enunciate with regard to prostitution at the close of the century. Listen to Mr. Shaw’s defence of Mrs. Warren’s Profession:

“The play is, simply, a study in prostitution, and its aim is to show that prostitution is not the prostitute’s fault, but the