Well, I'll defer to your research on the bios, but as for "what they were writing about", I think the names should be switched. Socialism brought ruin to both England and America; Dickens succeeded, Rand did not.
And I'm modifying the post after a quick trip to Wikipedia. Let it be known that Dickens attended some very good schools and was a prolific reader. His father was a government bureaucrat, apparently a wastrel but no doubt well-educated. Anyone entering the literary arts in Dickens' age had to be top-notch - there was too much competition, and society was not yet debased enough for stream-of-consciousness ramblings. As for Rand, she reached the New World at age 21, so even if she learned English in Russia, it was probably not very good. Her career in Hollywood was devoid of any real accomplishments, but as I recalled, she cut a broad swath with her scathing wit and towering intellect. This was during the 1920s and 30s, and if you think Stalin's Russia was a happy land of contented peasants, please do a little more reading. Ruthlessly-efficient collectivization killed a lot more people than the Czar's incompetent bungling.
And I'm gonna add something else. McWood didn't miss anything. You say there is nothing wrong with govt running SS if they do it right, but they can't. As long as govt produces the inflation numbers, they can understate it until, after 20 or 30 years, SS brings a hundred bucks or so in today's money, and there is nothing to stop another president from using it as a whip to herd the sheeple in whatever direction the socialist overlords want, as Obama did just last week. I think that backfired on him, too.