Dickens article is quite good by Menand

"Condition-of-England novels like “Bleak House” are generally thought of in relation to what John Ruskin called “illth.” Illth is the underside of wealth, the damage that change leaves in its wake, the human cost of progress. Novels show what statistics miss or disguise: what life was actually like, for many people, in the most advanced economy in the world."

 (Louis Menand "The Crisis That Nearly Cost Charles Dickens His Career" New Yorker: Published in the print edition of the March 7, 2022, issue, with the headline “The Inimitable.”)

I was trying to think what writer wrote about social conditions. Many do, but I thought of Barbara Kingsolver. 

"Dickens was a social critic. Almost all his fiction satirizes the institutions and social types produced by that dramatic transformation of the means of production. But he was not a revolutionary. His heroes are not even reformers. They are ordinary people who have made a simple commitment to decency. George Orwell, who had probably aspired to recruit Dickens to the socialist cause, reluctantly concluded that Dickens was not interested in political reform, only in moral improvement: “Useless to change institutions without a change of heart—that, essentially, is what he is always saying.”"

Dickens would have something to say about billionaire space flights: "When people are suffering in your own back yard, how can you strut around congratulating yourself on your latest inventions, or how much pig iron you are producing?"

Also: 

"Reviewers in Dickens’s time generally did not complain about what modern readers find hard to process: the melodrama, the rhetorical overkill, the staggering load of schmaltz. The comic characters are still astonishingly vivid. You get them right away. They might have stepped out of a Pixar movie. And it’s in throwaway scenes, comic episodes with no special dramatic importance, that we can see what made Dickens inimitable—in “Bleak House,” for example, when the law clerk Mr. Guppy takes two friends to lunch. They are Victorian-era bros, swaggering and clueless, a young male type Dickens loved. Any novelist today would kill to be able to produce such a scene. Dickens made dozens."