Charles Dickens

He was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and he had an unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory
at the age of 12 because his father went to prison for debts. He became a newspaper reporter with
the pen name Boz. In 1836 Sketches by Boz, articles about London people and scenes, were
published in instalments. He had success with autobiographical novels: Oliver Twist (1838), David
Copperfield (1849-50), Little Dorrit (1857). Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great
Expectations (1860-61) set against the background of social issues. He was also a busy editor of
magazines. He died in 1870. He lived in London for a long time, so he was called “London’s expert”.
Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London, which were depicted at three different
social levels:
 the parochial world of the workhouses 🡪 its inhabitants belong to the lower middle class.
 the criminal world murderers, pickpockets living in squalid slums.
 the Victorian middle class respectable people believing in human dignity.
He wrote a detailed description of ‘Seven Dials’, a notorious slum district, and its sense of
disorientation and confinement is clearly expressed in Dickens’s novels. Dickens shifted the social
frontiers of the novel: the 18th-century realistic upper middle-class world was replaced by the one
of the lower orders. He depicted Victorian society in all its variety, its richness and its squalor. He
created two different types of characters:
 caricatures he exaggerated and ridiculed peculiar social characteristics of the middle, lower
and lowest classes.
 weak female characters.
He was on the side of the poor, the outcast, the working-class. The themes were family, childhood
and poverty. Dickens’s children are either innocent or corrupted by adults and most of these
children begin in negative circumstances and rise to happy endings which resolve the
contradictions in their life created by the adult world. Dickens tried to get the common intelligence
of the country to alleviate social sufferings. He was a campaigning novelist and his books highlight
all the great Victorian controversies:
 The faults of the legal system (Oliver Twist and Bleak House)
 The horrors of factory employment (David Copperfield and Hard Times)
 Scandals in private schools (David Copperfield)
 The miseries of prostitution
 The appalling living conditions in slums (Bleak House)
 Corruption in government (Bleak House)
Dickens’s style was very rich and original. The main stylistic features of his novels are:
 long list of objects and people.
 adjectives used in pairs or in group of three and four.
 several details (not strictly necessary).
 Repetitions of the same word/s and/or sentence structure.
 The same concept/s is/are expressed more than once, but with different words.
 Use of antithetical images in order to underline the characters’ features.
 Exaggeration of the characters’ faults.
  Suspense at the end of the episodes or introduction of a sensational event to keep the
readers’ interest.
Oliver Twist
This Bildungsroman (an ‘education’ novel) appeared in instalments in 1837. It fictionalises the
humiliations Dickens experienced during his childhood. The protagonist, Oliver Twist, is always
innocent and pure and remains incorruptible throughout the novel. At the end he is saved from a
life of villainy by a well-to- do family. It’s set in London. Dickens attacked:
 the social evils of his times such as poor houses, unjust courts and the underworld.
 the world of the workhouses founded upon the idea that poverty was a consequence of
laziness.
 the officials of the workhouses because they abused the right of the poor as individuals
and caused them further misery.
Hard Times
It is a ‘denunciation novel’ and a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of industrial
society. The setting is Coketown, an imaginary industrialised town. The characters were people
living and working in Coketown. The protagonist is Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in
facts and statistics. The themes are:
 a critique of materialism and Utilitarianism.
 a denunciation of the ugliness and squalor of the new industrial age.
 the gap between the rich and the poor.
His Aim is to illustrate the dangers of allowing people to become like machines. Dickens’s work
transcends his time, language and culture.
 He was the man who invented the idea of a white Christmas.
o A famous writer stated: ‘Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert
Scrooge, they convert us.’ (G. K. Chesterton, 2007)
 'Dickensian' poverty
o Dickens was one of the first to describe the underclass and the poverty stricken in
Victorian London.
o ‘Dickensian’ 🡪 it has become the easiest word to describe an unacceptable level of
poverty.
 Modern character comedy
o the comic potential of the way his characters talk.
 The cinema
o Dickens was a key and important influence in cinema development.
o He invented the parallel montage where two stories run alongside each other and
the close-up.
 Meaningful names
o he refined the practice to suggest characters’ traits and their role.
o Some characters have become so recognisable that they have entered the language
as nouns (a Scrooge = somebody mean-spirited or lacking generosity).
 Our view of the law
o the current view of lawyer seems to be partly inspired by characters such as the
menacing lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House.
o What remains of the issues highlighted by Dickens is the cost of the legal
proceedings, particularly with small civil claims, is bound to exceed the damages
that are obtained.