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In their article "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns contribute to the study of Charles Dickens's Industrial Revolution-era fiction by examining his novels in relation to Karl Marx's social philosophy. Stearns and Burns postulate that Dickens relies on Marxist concepts of class consciousness, sacrifice, revolution, social antitheses, and social injustice to weave his narratives and compare and discuss six of Dickens' novels: A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations with three works of Marx: Grundrisse, The Communist Manifesto, and Capital. Their analysis suggests that the fictionalized world of Dickens parallels the fundamental social theses in Marx's writings. Further, their study reveals that the narratives of Dickens present Marx's concepts as relevant and accessible within popular imagination. Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns, "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011):  Ami E. STEARNS and Thomas J. BURNS About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx A comprehensive social theory serves an important function: it can help organize an array of otherwise disparate facts into a coherent whole. A body of literature, by a different route, can do something comparable. In the hands of masters, social theory and storytelling can and do open doors to perceiving the social world in dramatic ways. Natural affinities exist between sociology and any number of other disciplines and this can be seen, for example, in Charles Tilly's work with the overlap and distinct aspects of history and sociology or in Lewis Coser's work about how stories illustrate various theoretical ideas in sociology such as anomie and class conflict. Charles Dickens's novels offer the kind of insight into the subjective and inter-subjective realities of people which social scientists hope to glimpse but almost always seem to miss. Put another way, from a methodological standpoint, it is possible to see novels such as those of Dickens as "data," in the sense of its articulation of a worldview. Dickens asserts in the preface to A Tale of Two Cities that he took pains to ground the novel in historical fact. Yet a novelist like Dickens is after a deeper set of truths as well. There is, of course, the possibility of telling a large lie with lots of facts, each of them perhaps verifiably true. The novel seeks to do something akin to the opposite — to tell a larger truth with a series of fictional episodes. Dickens was a master at weaving a masterpiece from detail after detail of people, many of them from a largely ignored underclass, against the harsh backdrop of a society's crumbling feudal structure slowly, and inexorably giving way to industrial capitalism. Two men, separated by language, nationality, and methodology, nevertheless profoundly influenced the social world of the emerging Industrial Revolution using complementary perspectives. Contemporaries Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870) addressed multiple crises of a new underclass in response to the unprecedented escalation of European capitalism. Dickens, through his own experience as a child laborer, illustrated the plight of the proletariat in books like Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Marx's early interest in the evolution of economic production, coupled with Hegelian philosophical themes, resulted in The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. "Dickens," Judith Newton says, "has been significant for traditional Marxist criticism in that his texts deal explicitly with social issues" (452). Marx wrote of Dickens and his fellow novelists that "the present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together" ("The English Middle Class" 4). While the advent of the novel predates that of the discipline of sociology, both were born of the Enlightenment. The idea of the perfectibility of humanity was part of Auguste Comte's vision. Sociology as a discipline arose out of the conviction that human beings and their emergent institutions were amenable to scientific study. C.P. Snow articulated two cultures, one of science and its related tenets of positivism and the other a more humanistic variety. Comte had seen sociology falling squarely into the scientific realm, and yet much of sociological understanding has come as much from more humanistic studies as from strictly scientific sorts of endeavors. One of the chief proponents of this sort of approach was Kenneth Burke. Burke's "dramatism" put the emphasis on how people construct, maintain, communicate, and think in terms of the symbolic universes of which they are part. For Burke, thoughts and actions are facilitated or impeded by the symbol systems of a people (on recent applications of Burke's thought, see, e.g., Rutten; Soetaert, Bourgonjon, Rutten; Vandermeersche and Soetaert). A symbol system acts as a "screen of perception" such that ways of seeing are profoundly influenced by the symbols we use to help us perceive them. These screens of perception would become so embedded in people's worldviews that they would not necessarily be obvious to the person relying on it (see Burke, Grammar; for an in-depth discussion, see Burns and LeMoyne). Pierre Bourdieu develops the idea of habitus and field. A habitus carries with it an entire worldview. Some novelists are better than others at capturing habitus. Tom Wolfe speaks volumes about the habitus of, for example, the selective college drinking fraternity and the southern U.S. mountain cultures in I Am Charlotte Simmons. Yet few if any writers have withstood the test of time for the ability to capture in a few lines a habitus and the social field of which it is part like Dickens. Marx's theory of historical materialism Ami E. Stearns and Thomas J. Burns, "About the Human Condition in the Works of Dickens and Marx" page 3 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011):  holds that different modes of economic production characterize every stage of history. In the early stages of communism, stories and songs told of the daily struggle to obtain food, clothing, and shelter. With the development of an increasingly complex society, these stories became divorced from the survival process and the storyteller split from the worker: "the bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers" (Marx, Capital 37). One perspective involves theorizing that literature became a muddy, abstract concept, tenuously attached to the economic base in the superstructure, reflecting only the traditions and mores of the ruling class (see Ngara). Yet we believe the story is much richer and more complex. Charles Dickens, haunted by his experiences as a child factory laborer, not only committed to paper the plight of the proletariat with literary flair and competence but also distributed this material with an ease once only granted to the elite. If the Industrial Revolution inflicted upon the proletariat suffering indignant enough to fill the pages of novels, it also offered, through advanced printing techniques and capitalistic marketing efforts, the advantage for mass distribution of these tales. After an oppressed people found a voice in Dickens, the ancient storyteller could reunite with tales of economic production. But where the primitive song, dance, and story once celebrated the harvest or the hunt, now these particular art forms lamented the ways in which the means of survival had been twisted and perverted by the Industrial Revolution. Peter Lamarque writes that "works in the canonical literary tradition ... are thought to be especially valuable for holding up a mirror to life" (117). Literary characters act against cultural and social backdrops which influence their behavior and choices. To Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fact that the novel could represent an actual social milieu was a huge advantage. The realism disguised under literary devices could accomplish dual purposes, both as a means of provoking a new kind of "social consciousness" (Ngara 23) among the bourgeoisie and as a means of raising the proletariat's class consciousness. The upper class needed to know firsthand the sufferings of the poor. As Engels discovered in Manchester, the upper and middle classes commuted from country home to place of business or shopping without a glimpse of the byproducts of capitalism: the disfigured bodies, the rotting homes, the filth and hopelessness (see Wilson). Enclosed trains zipped the bourgeoisie to and from the center of town, keeping them ignorant of the smells of disease and stagnant water that represented the innards of the working-class world. Behind the small shops lining the main corridors lurked the "man behind the curtain": the displaced person, the child laborer, the hungry factory worker, who all kept the wheels of capitalism turning. Engels might have viewed this as the illusion of capitalism, for as long as those who control the means of production do not have to confront its realities, injustice will continue. Marx believed that as class consciousness dawned upon the proletariat, they would understand that they must rise together against the bourgeoisie. One wonders if Marx believed his ideas, in written or oral form, were accessible or even comprehensible to the working class, whom he considered as the chosen people to fulfill his prophecy (see Wilson). With the serialization and mass distribution of Dickens's stories, however, the proletariat could begin to digest the real meat of Marxism. While some forms of