Dickens did write this thought — but not in these words. In The Wreck of the Golden Mary, the Christmas 1856 story whose opening section is his, his shipwrecked narrator says of the electric telegraph that “it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true.” The sentence that circulates today is a later rewrite: the telegraph is deleted, “electric communication” is dropped in, and the men are made genderless.
“Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true” widely credited to Charles Dickens, but this is a modern rewrite. Dickens wrote: "But, it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true" — of the electric telegraph, in "The Wreck of the Golden Mary," Household Words Extra Christmas Number, Christmas 1856, p. 10. Via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The passage Dickens actually wrote
Work
The Wreck of the Golden Mary
First published
Household Words, Extra Christmas Number, Christmas 1856 — Dickens’s section, pages 1–10; the passage on page 10
Speaker
The shipwrecked narrator of Dickens’s section, Captain William George Ravender
Status
Genuine passage — but the popular sentence is a later rewrite of it
Twenty-seven nights and twenty-six days. We were in no want of rain-water, but we had nothing else. And yet, even now, I never turned my eyes upon a waking face but it tried to brighten before mine. O! what a thing it is, in a time of danger, and in the presence of death, the shining of a face upon a face! I have heard it broached that orders should be given in great new ships by electric telegraph. I admire machinery as much as any man, and am as thankful to it as any man can be for what it does for us. But, it will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true. Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.
Christmas 1856
The circulating quotation is a rewrite of one sentence here — the one beginning “But, it will never be a substitute” — with “it” (the electric telegraph) replaced by “electric communication” and the two men made genderless.
The sentence people share is not in Dickens as written. Quote Investigator ↗ traced it to a passage in The Wreck of the Golden Mary and set out what was changed: one sentence lifted out, the pronoun pointing at the telegraph deleted, “electric communication” substituted, and the male referents made genderless.
The original sits on page 10 of the 1856 Extra Christmas Number of Household Words. The scan is at Dickens Journals Online ↗, where the narrator says the telegraph “will never be a substitute for the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true.”
Because the Christmas number was a collaboration, authorship had to be checked. The Dickens Search contents listing ↗ gives “The Wreck,” pages 1–10, to Dickens, with Wilkie Collins picking up at page 11 — so the telegraph passage falls inside Dickens’s own pages.
Modern quote sites drop the source entirely: Goodreads ↗ carries the reworded sentence under Dickens’s name with no work named at all, which is how it ends up quoted as a verdict on email.
✓Public domain
The Wreck of the Golden Mary first appeared in the Extra Christmas Number of Household Words for Christmas 1856, so Dickens’s text is long out of copyright in the United States and free to quote — Project Gutenberg carries the full story ↗. That public-domain status attaches to what Dickens actually wrote, not to the modern rewrite that circulates in his name.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What drifted
Nothing here was invented out of thin air — the line has a real Dickens ancestor on a real printed page. But almost every element of how it is presented has drifted from what he actually wrote.
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The wordingCharles Dickens, as usually quoted Reworded
Quote Investigator ↗ lists the changes: a single sentence was lifted out of the paragraph, the pronoun referring to the telegraph was removed, the generic term “electric communication” was substituted, and the male referents were made genderless.
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The subjectEmail, texting and social media Anachronism
Dickens is objecting to a proposal that shipboard orders be given by electric telegraph. As the reader who put the question to Quote Investigator ↗ noted, Bell received his telephone patent in 1876 and Dickens died in 1870 — the technologies the quote is now used against did not exist in his lifetime.
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The citationQuote aggregator sites No source
The reworded sentence travels with no work attached at all — Goodreads ↗ carries it under Dickens’s name without naming any book or story, which is what lets it read as a comment on modern life.
✓Dickens really did write the thought — on page 10 of his own section of the 1856 Extra Christmas Number, where the line reads “the face of a man, with his soul in it, encouraging another man to be brave and true,” said of the electric telegraph. You can read the original page ↗.
Context
What Dickens was actually arguing with
Dickens was not warning anyone about email. In 1856 he was answering a specific engineering proposal of his own moment: that orders aboard “great new ships” should be passed by electric telegraph rather than carried, face to face, by an officer. He gives the objection to a castaway — a man who has spent twenty-seven nights in an open boat and has just described how every waking face in that boat tried to brighten whenever he looked at it. That is the experience the sentence is measured against, and the excised context is what makes it bite: “Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.”
The modern version survives by throwing that context away. Strip the telegraph, generalise to “electric communication,” neutralise the pronouns, and you have a line that reads as a Victorian novelist prophesying about inboxes and group chats. It circulates in exactly that role: Quote Investigator ↗ was asked about it by a reader who had met it in a corporate-communications textbook, and traced it back to the 1856 story.
“Never try it for that. It will break down like a straw.”
Who wrote what in the 1856 Christmas number
The Extra Christmas Number of Household Words for 1856 was a collaboration, so authorship is worth pinning down before crediting anyone. The contents listing at Dickens Search ↗ assigns “The Wreck,” pages 1–10, to Charles Dickens; Wilkie Collins takes over at page 11 with the chief mate’s narrative and later writes “The Deliverance,” while Percy Fitzgerald, Harriet Parr, Adelaide Anne Procter and the Rev. James White supply the tales told in the boats.
The telegraph passage sits on page 10 — inside Dickens’s own section — which is also why it was reprinted among his solo work in the Chapman & Hall Christmas Stories, the 1894 edition that Project Gutenberg transcribed ↗.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1812–1870 · English novelist and journalist; publisher and editor of Household Words (1850–1859)
Charles Dickens was an English writer and journalist whose novels — Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Great Expectations — made him the most widely read author of the Victorian age. He was also a working editor: he published, edited and wrote heavily for the journal Household Words from 1850 to 1859, including its enormously popular Extra Christmas Numbers, which he co-wrote each year with friends such as Wilkie Collins. He died in 1870, six years before Alexander Graham Bell was granted his telephone patent — which is why any quotation putting him on the subject of electronic messaging deserves a second look.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Dickens, Charles. “The Wreck of the Golden Mary.” Household Words, Extra Christmas Number, Christmas 1856, 1–10; passage at page 10. Rewritten modern form documented in “Quote Origin: Electronic Communication Will Never Be a Substitute for the Face of Someone Who With Their Soul Encourages,” Quote Investigator, 27 April 2010.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/electric-communication-will-never-be-a-substitute-for-the/