They want to censor Dickens because he shows humanity the wrongs that cause our downfall. From my senior thesis outlining the main causes of the Civil War:

So what did cause the Civil War? The popular view that slavery was the cause has not always been the accepted one, as the second ‘Great Debate’ between Charles Dickens and John Stuart Mill highlighted from 1861-1862. “The view that slavery caused the Civil War was popularized by Mill, the leading English writer on political economy at that time…In 1862 and during the war, he insisted that slavery was the cause of the conflict, and that theory has dominated Civil War thinking ever since.” Even Karl Marx was able to see the conflict for what it really was. He said, “The war between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for sovereignty.” Looking closer at the arguments presented by both Dickens and Mill, it’s no wonder the latter view became popular in Northern newspapers, while Dickens’ view never became mainstream.

“Though Dickens condemned slavery, he deemed it unlikely that it had been the cause of the war. He asked: ‘If it be not slavery, where lies the partition of the interests that has led at last to actual separation of the Southern from the Northern states?’ And the answer: In the original Constitution, wrote Dickens, it was provided that all taxes ‘shall be uniform throughout the United States... so, reasoned Dickens, ‘the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions [of dollars] a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many other evils.’ He ends with these words: ‘the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel.” Within the next two months, Mill published his response in the famous Fraser’s Magazine.

So why did each man have such a differing view of the war? Dickens and Mill were very different in their explanations for the Civil War as well as in their backgrounds. “Dickens grew up in the slums and squalor of London. He was twelve years old when he was forced to abandon any formal education. Growing up in these conditions colored his view of life and found expression in his novels. He saw the horrors of poverty, the love of money and its evil as a force in society, government, and all levels of life. He saw the Civil War through this lens [however, Mill’s] father decided to raise his son in a cloistered environment, removed from the real world. He learned Greek, Latin, and a host of languages at an age not much beyond today’s grammar school. He was to be a kind of super intellectual, to rise above all the learned of his day…His analysis of the Civil War and slavery as its ‘one cause’ found favor among northern apologists who wanted a simple answer to a national tragedy.”

It seems the evidence vindicates Dickens and his economic view of the war. Unfortunately, Mill’s view has survived where Dickens’ has all but disappeared. “Dickens saw money as the root of the War Between the States. Unfortunately for the cause of history, it was Mill’s, not Dickens’, argument that was reproduced in the northern press, which was hungry for an excuse to invade the South. Mill’s argument that slavery was the one cause of the Civil War became common wisdom, and the Dickensian view virtually disappeared, even among Ivy League Civil War historians who, like Mill, live in an economic cloistered world, which minimizes the role money plays in the affairs of men.” There can be no doubt that this idea survives even today, as most history tends to downplay the role of economics.

Interestingly enough, Dickens’ Wikipedia page makes no mention of his Civil War writings, specifically his ‘Great Debate’ with John Stuart Mill. At the bottom of the page there’s a ‘see also’ link that takes you to a page dedicated to proving that Dickens was an extreme racist, as reflected in his novels. Even here, only one sentence is given to his Civil War writings, and it makes him out to be a racist as well. Like the revisionists of today, this is a common technique used to paint anyone with opposing views as a racist. Dickens was apparently a racist because, “Ackroyd also notes that Dickens did not believe that the North in the American Civil War was genuinely interested in the abolition of slavery, and he nearly publicly supported the South for that reason.” The statement is false, but it seems that Dickens’ view is being suppressed even today. Lysander Spooner, a fiery abolitionist, wrote in his 1870 book No Treason, “The pretense that the ‘abolition of slavery’ was either a motive or justification for the war is a fraud of the same character with that of ‘maintaining the national honor.” This is the same guy that helped plot John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry as well as funded slave uprisings and militias in the South. How is it that one of the top abolitionists of the day claimed that slavery was not the cause of the war?

I'd be willing to bet that nobody here was taught any of this during history class.

This is really interesting. Fantastic post. Do you have a link to your entire thesis?