The man who did more than anyone to improve the lives of the poor in Victorian times held no public office; he was neither a Minister of the Crown, nor of religion.

He earnt his living by telling stories. Yet his “fiction” contained more truths than a dozen reports of Royal Commissions.

He was Charles Dickens.

The 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth fell on Tuesday.

Dickens lived in the south of England. But he travelled to the mill towns of Lancashire, and was appalled by what he witnessed.

The dreadful physical conditions in which children and adults were required to work in the cotton mills were, in his view, compounded by the hard-faced men who owned the mills, and controlled the towns.

His tirade against both is to be found in his shortest novel Hard Times, one of my favourites.

Written in 1854, his story is situated in “Coketown”, a thinly disguised Preston, which he’d visited earlier that year. His key characters, the industrialist Josiah Bounderby, and the school master, the wonderfully named Thomas Gradgrind were “utilitarians”.

People like this justified the unequal world from which they benefitted by claims that what mattered was the “greatest happiness of the greatest number” – ignoring the misery which unlucky individuals (thousands of them), like mill-hands, suffered on the way to the sunlit uplands for the fortunate minority.

Dickens had contempt for these people who knew the price of everything, but had no sense of value, nor fairness. “Now, what I want is facts” was Gradgrind’s refrain; anything else, beauty, truth, imagination, was dismissed as “fancy”.

Dickens’ extraordinary skill was in getting the Bounderby’s and Gradgrinds of the world to read his stories, and hold the mirror to themselves.

Gradually, there was an awakening, both by the workers through their trades unions, but also by many of the middle-classes, that conditions like those in Coketown were intolerable, and had to change.

But the wonderful thing about his novels is that they not only tell us about life when he wrote them, but about the human condition today.