Charles Dickens at 200

Charles Dickens appreciated the endless foibles of humanity as perhaps no one since Shakespeare. With great affection, he loved to tweak our pretensions and contradictions.

"Charity begins at home," one of his characters declared in a trademark bit of Dickensian wit, "and justice begins next door."

But despite the humor and all those delicious names – Ebenezer Scrooge, Oliver Twist, Madame Defarge – Dickens had no patience for human failure. He was a fighter for justice, a well-off rebel who distrusted revolutions but still used his words to push for reform.

"He didn't advocate grand schemes to improve the world," says Mike Quinn, a former New York City parole officer who founded The Friends of Dickens New York. "He simply showed how each individual can make a difference by noticing, by caring, by encouraging."

As today marks the 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth, the question of society's obligations is on many lips, from those of presidential candidates who want to trim the American safety net to protesters who decry the dominance of the 1 percent.

People on the right and left might feel tempted to tap the Dickens hoopla (including a bounty of events on both sides of the Atlantic) and find support for their points of view in the author's work. "He can be used for different ends, depending on one's political views," says Lillian Nayder, a professor of English at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and author of the new book "The Other Dickens," about his wife, Catherine.

On one hand, his support of the poor and needy may make him seem liberal. But his appreciation of the value of charitable do-gooding by individuals gives him a conservative shine.

There's a problem with all this, however. Dickens fans say he doesn't quite fit perfectly into today's modern political boxes.

For one thing, he'd be just about the last person you'd find occupying anything, except maybe a nice London flat. Dickens was fascinated by political protest, but he saw menace in mobs and working-class revolutions, Ms. Nayder says.

"Wholesale societal movements were intimidating to him," she says. "That's not a place Dickens wanted to go. He liked social stability, and he liked social order. He was an up-and-coming middle-class man and had an expensive house and a staff of five servants. It's not as if he wanted the political structure of England to be changed."

But Dickens did want things to be different, and he went after injustice with uncommon weapons: a deep knowledge of wrongdoing in British society and a commitment to treating the poor as worthy human beings.

Dickens took field trips to understand the country in which he lived, even faking an identity to explore the pathetic state of the boarding schools that he exposed in "Nicholas Nickleby." "What outraged him more than anything else, in my opinion, was to see any vulnerable person, especially a child, being beaten down or treated unfairly," says Mr. Quinn, the Dickens fan in New York City.

But Dickens understood the world of the downtrodden long before he set pen to paper.

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