re: #167 wheat-doggha — oo bird outside my window

Dickens’ works were one of the main reasons for the establishment of better protection for the poor, for debtors and for orphans. They were serialized, and he was so good at pacing his plots that people were as hooked by them as people now are by Game of Thrones or Agents of SHIELD. So, he took advantage of his bully pulpit, as it were.

Black Beauty served a similar purpose for creation of laws protecting horses and other animals from cruelty and abuse.

So, what we need today is a writer who can vividly show the rest of America what life is like for the bottom 1%, or 10%.

Whereas Upton Sinclair was disheartened to find that the public cared more about the few pages discussing unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses in The Jungle than they did about the rest of the book’s theme of the appalling conditions the country’s poor lived and worked in.