“As the whispers became louder, which they did from that time every minute, they became more threatening. He had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye; he had been taken up by all sorts of people in quite an unaccountable manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous. In steady progress, as the day declined, the talk rose in sound and purpose.”

—Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit

Dickens wrote those words of his character Mr. Merdle, a financier whose mythical moneymaking abilities caused him to be lionized by rich and poor alike, until they discovered that he was nothing more than a swindler. Could the great novelist ever have imagined that his own reputation might suffer a similar fate?

Not long after Dickens wrote about the wicked and secretive Merdle, he began keeping a secret of his own. He tried to keep it for the rest of his life, but details leaked out, and after his death the whole story eventually became known to the world. Smitten with a young actress named Ellen Ternan, Dickens had turned against and separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty years and the mother of his ten children. His behavior throughout the episode – like that of a “madman,” as his daughter Katey recounted – brought “misery and unhappiness” to his family, and cost him close friendships. It brought him misery and unhappiness as well, as he strove to justify himself (without much success) in public but suffered guilt in private, according to his daughter Mamie.

That behavior has long been a source of sorrow for fans who love the magnanimous humanity of his work and struggle to reconcile these two disparate sides of him.

I sometimes think of how another of my favorite writers, Dorothy L. Sayers, spoke of her friend and mentor Charles Williams after his death, as she slowly came to recognize the theologian and Anglican mystic’s tendency to act like a cult leader during his life: “But I hate finding weaknesses in Charles, who showed me so much.” I, too, hate finding weaknesses in anyone I care about, whether it be a close friend or a beloved Victorian author.

But as the book of Numbers warns us, “Be sure your sin will find you out.” We live in a time when many, many sins are being found out. The behavior of cultural icons, spiritual leaders, and prominent thinkers has been reexamined and found wanting, to say the least. Dickens is among these. As a blogger and frequent writer on Dickens, I keep track of headlines and social media references to him. In recent years, these have become more and more tabloid-like, with references to the “ruthless husband” and “the martyrdom of the forgotten wife.”

As the sordid details recirculate through cyberspace, I see a lot of readers declaring that they’re done with Dickens – or more often, that they’re never even going to start reading him.

I’m not complaining about the phenomenon we call “cancel culture.” Of course it can go overboard – for one thing, it can ride roughshod over the truth. I frequently see exaggerated or even made-up details about the Dickens affair in clickbait articles and social media posts. The real details are bad enough; why must fake ones be piled on? Yet it should also be acknowledged that a genuinely moral impulse drives many censurers: a desire for justice for those, like Catherine Dickens, who were treated terribly and had little recourse.

That desire for justice is not at all a bad thing. It has led many Dickens readers to write Catherine back into the narrative, in modern parlance. Biographers and museum exhibitions ensure she is remembered and honored as she deserves. But there are others who would go further. They would write Charles Dickens out of the narrative.

In cases like this, when all involved are dead, the argument that the guilty party doesn’t deserve our money seems moot, as he or she isn’t there to receive it anyway. But there’s still often a movement among many to distance themselves from the person’s work, and this, in my observation, is where the desire for justice sometimes curdles into pride. A continued love for that work begins, in certain quarters, to seem at odds with moral purity itself, as if appreciation of the work equates to acceptance of the behavior.

“Every partaker of his magnificent feasts would be seen to have been a sharer in the plunder of innumerable homes,” as Dickens wrote of Mr. Merdle. Dickens, in his own way, gives us feasts – great feasts of words that fill readers with delight, indignation, pity, distress, a whole host of emotions – but knowing what we know of his personal life, are we tainted if we partake? Will those feasts poison our minds and souls?

The question brings me back to Sayers (incidentally, a fellow Dickens admirer). While her reaction to her friend’s indiscretions may have been flawed, she nonetheless offers a helpful framework for considering such situations, rooted in a view of God as the ultimate giver of talents.

The protagonist of Sayers’s 1937 play The Zeal of Thy House is William of Sens, a twelfth-century architect rebuilding Canterbury Cathedral after a fire. William’s character is deeply flawed, but his work is brilliant. When his pride leads – quite literally – to a fall, rendering him disabled, William finally learns to humble himself before God. And yet, Sayers suggests, his work was serving God even while he was not.

“The work is sound, Lord God, no rottenness there— / Only in me,” William prays at last. Even while recognizing and confessing his sin, he can offer up the good work he did for the Lord. In the same way, we can recognize a person’s sin and yet simultaneously recognize that their work is good. There are limits, of course, and lines to be drawn – sometimes one simply cannot stomach the work of an abuser or a predator, for instance – but in many cases, we don’t have to give up work we love. We don’t even have to separate the art from the artist, as so many have tried to do but found so difficult. We can instead look at the complexity of fallen human beings and be grateful that at least one facet of their character faithfully reflects the goodness of their Creator.

Perhaps Dickens, after all, was not so much like his character Mr. Merdle, who used his work to enrich himself and impoverish others. Dickens’s work, like William of Sens’s, is sound. It represents all that was best in him – tenderness and humor and generosity. We can lament the times when he failed to show those qualities in his life, but to deprive ourselves of them in his work would be to impoverish ourselves.