It is not merely a
coincidence that Dickens never writes about agriculture and writes endlessly
about food. He was a Cockney, and London is the centre of the earth in rather
the same sense that the belly is the centre of the body. It is a city of
consumers, of people who are deeply civilized but not primarily useful. A thing
that strikes one when one looks below the surface of Dickens's books is that,
as nineteenth-century novelists go, he is rather ignorant
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