TIM CAVANAUGH: Dickens is back. Watch your wallet. “If you want to understand the economy, don’t turn to the author of Oliver Twist for answers. . . . There are feudal elements in Dickensomics, a fondness for a universe where everything stays in its proper place. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly praised one of Dickens’ literary virtues that others might treat as a vice: that his characters by and large do not change in the course of the story. But what comes across most clearly is a journalist’s fake sophistication about money, a belief that the wealth just somehow exists and needs only to get to the right people (or be returned to them, sometimes after being retrieved from Jews and moneylenders). It’s a boom-time mentality, the kind of thing you can only believe when you are, as Dickens was, well into a period of massive wealth creation, so that you have come to take good fortune for granted. If that’s Dickens’ lesson for our Hard Times, somebody ought to call CNBC.”