In Dickens' novels, characters are cast in detailed and purposeful social situations, and an evaluated social world is created. Yet even those critics who agree roughly that this is so, and agree further on the stature of these novels, disagree markedly as to Dickens' own politics or view of society—disagree in fundamental respects, that is, on what disposition of mind lies behind and shapes these novels. Sometimes the disagreement has in part to do with personal conviction. G. K. Chesterton, a Catholic with mixed politics of his own, bolsters as he can Dickens' orthodoxy. T. A. Jackson, a naive Marxist with insufficient respect for brute fact, attempts to show that Dickens was a Communist in all but name, and “that the really fundamental incompatibility between Dickens and his wife lay in the complete antithesis of their convictions about contemporary society as a whole.”