The Cultural Tutor points out that Charles Dickens wrote over a million words in his career — a decent amount of which were on Victorian London’s most awful and violent underbelly — and yet he never used a swear word.

Take Scrooge:

Dickens does not rely on brutality or violence, or vulgar language, to make him so despicable. It is rather by his simple acts of meanness and miserliness… that Scrooge seems so cruel.

How tempting, when describing something bad, to immediately choose the most vivid imagery or direct language. Dickens proves that we need not necessarily do so.