Assignment: Paper E-C- 202, 203, 205.

Assignment: Paper E-C- 204,

Topic: Charles Dickens as an Observer of 19th Century English Society

Students Name: Pooja N. Trivedi,

Roll No – 20,

M. A. Part – I, Semester –II,

Batch Year – 2010-2011,

Submitted To – Miss Ruchira Dudhrejiya, 

                                Department of English,

                                Bhavnagar University,

                                Bhavnagar.

“DICKENS IS NOT ONLY A SPOKESMAN OF HIS AGE BUT ALSO IT’S CRITIC.”

Most literary historians and critics have taken some account of the relation of individual authors to the circumstances of the social and cultural era in which they live and write, as well as of the relation of a literary work to the segment of society that its fiction represents or to which the work is addressed. As W.J.Long points out in his ‘History of English literature’:

            “A great book generally reflects not only the author’s life and thought but also Spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation’s history.”

            Literary works are affected by such circumstances as its author’s class status, gender, political and other interests; the ways of thinking and feeling characteristic of its era; the social class, conceptions and values etc. 

            Corruption and evils were running rampant in every nook and corner of the Victorian society and the novelist took upon themselves a self-imposed task to predicate the evils that had already attracted the pens of the intellectuals.  Among the Victorian novelists Dickens was the greatest social reformer who directed his pen to root out the evils of the Victorian society. Charles Dickens’s dissatisfaction with the prevailing social condition and the keenness for social reform led him to satirize social institutions. In almost all his novels whether sad or humorous he laid his finger on the drawbacks and evils of the Victorian society which Shakespeare had already hinted in Hamlet:

            “The oppressor’s wrong the proud man’s contumely.

            ………………the law’s delay,

            The insolence of office, and the spurns

            That patient merit of the unworthy takes.”

            In the Victorian society, Dickens became very popular because he harnessed his pen for the amelioration of the suffering and pathetic conditions of the poor factory workers, little children groaning under the whips of tyrannical school-masters, litigants moving about law courts without getting any justice, and prisoners subjected to the hardship of rigorous prison life. Dickens tried to arouse public conscience to these evils, though he alone was not a pioneer in reformative zeal which had appeared earlier in the novels of Defoe, Goldsmith, fielding etc.  But in the novels of Dickens the reformative zeal was particularly emphasized. After the publication of ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘Nicholas Nickley’ and Old Curiosity Shop, he was, to quote W.L. Cross,

“The greatest social reformer for full thirty years.”

            He knew his people best and gave them what they wanted. Dickens never wrote down to his public. He was a part of his public. His books were not made ; they were born. To Dickens, the contemporary scene is always important themes concerned with the problems of mid-nineteenth century society, its familiar scenes and people were the chosen subject of his fiction.

Dickens railed against the social, political, economic and educational drawback of his times. In ‘Oliver Twist’ Dickens exposed the weakness of the Parish administration. Its shows in all the colours the misadventures of a poor parish boy, Oliver, who was born in a workhouse and fell in the hands of thieves and receivers who brought him up in the standards of Fagin’s academy. Here, Dickens uses two fold treatment to uncover the drawbacks of society. On one hand, he shows the workhouses which are the embodiment of obsession, exploitation and evil under the disguise of the laws for helping poor. The workhouse world is full of a bitter and pitiful comedy. Here Dickens irony serves him as a sharp edged sword with which he attacks the demons of cruelty.

In the baby-farm under the care of Mrs.Mann ‘twenty or thirty other Juvenil offenders against the poor laws rolled about the floor all day,without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental superintendence of an elderly female, Mrs. Mann was a women of ‘wisdom and eperience’ and was great ‘experimental scholar,philosopher , she knew what was good for herself.

Further, Dickens presents how these work houses turn out to be a place for gradual death and exploitation of the poor. As Dickens writes in the second chapter of the ‘Oliver Twist.

  “Oh said the board, looking very knowing we are the fellows to set this to right well stop it all, in no time.’ So they established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative, of being starved by a gradual process in the houses , or by a quick one out of it.

He considers these practices to be utterly inhuman.

On the other hand he presen dark picture of crime world what a pitiful comedy. Wouldn’t the world be better if men behaved more humanely and decently? And since they don’t what do they mark of the unprotected, neglected starved  and ------ children? The answer is the persons like Dodger, Pagin,Sikes.

            Dickens was a painter of London life. He was unsoundly  the novelist of London life but his art as a portrayer of London life was not that of a photographer. God had endowed him with keen imagination and he gave rich colour of his fecund imagination to whatever he described about London life Hugh Walker says,

            “What Dickens gives us is not the bare hard fact, but the fact suffused with the glow of rich imagination”.

            He makes things more ugly and sordid than what they might have been by his imagination inclined towards  exaggeration. This means that the world Dickens created is the world as we normally conceive it transformed, heightened in a sense cruder more  lightly colored more violent. The beings that inhabit it are much more sharply differentiated one from another than altogether more wicked, i.e. altogether richer in idiosyneracy people seen in real life.’

            The ‘real world’is there all right we are on solid ground but is some ways it seems to be mainly as a starting off place. It is as though the ‘real world’ can suddenly become either the county or fairytale land and we realize reading Dickens that nightmare and fairyland have common frontiers and mere each into the other. The novel ‘Oliver Twist’, Dickens followed is a night mare of a terrified child hunted by ogress.

            Thus Dickens was essential the novelist of London life. It was within his range to portray London streets, lamps,courts and middle class life. The country side had found its storytellers in Scott and Jane Austen and the town life was reflcected in the novels of Fielding and smollet but these social conditions had changed vastly. The changes brought by the Industrial Revolution found the echo in the novels of Dickens. He knew from painful experience the life of the workshop the office and the terrible life of the streets.

            At eleven years of age he went to work in the cellar of a blacking factory. He worked from dawn to dusk for a few pennies and associated with touches and waifs in his brief intervals of labour, but we can see in the sources of that intimate knowledge of the hearts of the poor and outcast which was to be reflected in his novels. His experience of his childhood from the wrap and woof of his novels, and are presented with his acute sensibility and plasimagination to enlist the sumpathy of reader for the suffering humanity.

            Deeper problems of human life are also ruled out from the scheme of the Victorian novels. This limitation is characteristic feature of all the Victorian novelists and of Dickens novels. The most successful creation of the Victorian novelists are characters pains and sufferings of child life. Dickens is primarily interested in presenting the sorrows, sufferings, and privations suffered by his children characters.

            Dickens was a ruthless critic of the Victorian society. A note of social satire runs thoroughly almost all his novels.

            ED MUND WILSON ASSERTS.

            “Dickens was of all the great Victorian writers probably the most antagonist to the Victorian age itself.”

            He was not only gave poetic shape to the better tendencies of English life, he also attacked the advocate of the down trodden and the oppresses.

            Through all these if should be clearly understood that Dickens sought the solution of social problems in the change of spirit in men rather than in any change in the fundamental structure of society. His quarrel is with human feelings, why they are so petty and narrow minded, so brutel. This point admirably quoted by  George Orwell in his essay on Charles Dickens in ‘collected essays’

            “The truth is that Dickens’s criticism of society is almost exclusively moral.           

            He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and

            Forth, without very clearly suggesting what he would put in their places.”

            Dickens on the whole was no doubts a social reformer , but he himself did not take up the challenges in his hands nor did personally work as a social reformer like shufflary. His role as a social reformer was somply to arouse the public conscience to these evils. To quote Compton ricket rightly remarks.

            “Dickens proved to be that rape type of reformer who could moralize with a smile on his lips and mix his sermonic powders in such excellent jam that his contemporaries did not realize for a while that he was doctoring them for their good.”

            He was truly a Victorian and get hs is for all ages. His revolt was simply and solely the eternal revolt it was the revolt of the weak against the strong says  G.K.Chesterton, “he did not dislike this or that agreement for oppression: he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of man when he looks down on another man.