Charles Dickens

 Victorian Voices: The Social Critique of Charles Dickens 

Charles Dickens was one of the most beloved and distinctive novelists of Victorian England. He was born in the coastal town of Portsmouth in southern England as the child of a clerk in the Naval Pay Office. Due to harsh conditions, his family had to struggle with economic problems. A friend of his father's offered Charles a job in a shoe-blacking factory, and he began to work. Two weeks later, his father was arrested and sent to Marshalsea Prison for debt. His family went to live in prison with him, as was the custom; however, they decided that Charles should remain outside, living with a woman who took in young boarders, to maintain some stability and continuity in his life. He lived with a woman who provided board for young students, enabling him to continue his education and work.

The months during which Charles lived alone and worked in the blacking warehouse were traumatic, and the intense feelings of humiliation and abandonment that Dickens experienced shaped his fiction in profound ways. Dickens utilized his own experiences to craft characters like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip in "Great Expectations" whose mistreatment reflects Dickens's strong critique of society. These characters not only resonate with readers personally but also function as instruments for social commentary and critique. It was, however, a most painful life for him. Years afterward, he was writing of his own experiences when he put down in "David Copperfield" such sentences as these:

"I know I do not exaggerate, unconsciously, or unintentionally, the scantiness of my resources, or the difficulties of my life... I know that I worked from morning until night, with common men and boys, a shabby child. I know that I lounged about the streets, insufficiently and unsatisfactorily fed. I know that, but for the mercy of God, I might easily have been, for any care that was taken of me, a little robber or a little vagabond. How much I suffered it is, as I have said already, utterly beyond any power to tell. But I kept my own counsel, I did my own work."

In the story of "David Copperfield" the great novelist has told, more fully than in any other of his books, the story of his own life. ("The Journal of Education," 1912, p. 39).  At fifteen, Dickens started working as a junior clerk at a law office, and eighteen months later, he became a freelance newspaper reporter. He initially published literary sketches anonymously. In 1836, on his twenty-fourth birthday, he published the collection "Sketches by Boz". The success of this volume led to a commission from the publishers Chapman & Hall to serialize a book with companion illustrations. The result was "The Pickwick Papers" (1836—37), which brought Dickens fame and prosperity. Mr. Dickens is said to have been at this time "singularly and noticeably prepossessing; bright, animated, eager, with talent and energy written in every line of his face." The alchemy of a fine nature had transmuted his disadvantages into gold. To him the lessons of such a childhood and youth as he had had were energy, self-reliance, a determination to overcome all obstacles, to fight the battles of life in all honor and rectitude, so as to win. From the middle of his father's affairs, he had taken away a lesson in method, order, and punctuality in business and other arrangements. "What is worth doing at all is worth doing well" was not only one of his favorite maxims, but it was the rule of his life. And, again, "throughout his life he worked desperately hard.

Despite the bleakness of Dickens's view of society and the fierceness of his criticism, his novels invariably conclude with a sentimental affirmation of the virtues of home and heart. Readers and critics, spanning both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, frequently perceived this sentimentality as dulling his social analysis. While Dickens endeavors to employ fiction to stir the human heart and elicit humanitarian sentiments, the domestic sanctuaries depicted in his novels seldom catalyze change in the world beyond their confines.

Charles Dickens' depiction of women in his novels reflects his personal experiences and relationships. Specifically, it mentions two types of female characters: those depicted as inadequate in maintaining domestic order, possibly influenced by Dickens' own family life, and those portrayed as impossibly good and unattainable ideals, possibly inspired by women he knew in his early adulthood. Charles Dickens fell in love with Maria Beadnell, who came from a wealthy banking family. However, their courtship was discouraged by Maria's family, who believed Dickens was not suitable for her. This rejection left Dickens feeling a deep sense of loss, as he perceived Maria as his ideal woman, despite being unable to be with her. In 1858, Charles Dickens separated from his wife, marking a notable shift in both his personal and professional life. Additionally, he gave up his participation in amateur theatricals and instead began a series of lucrative professional readings of his own works. However, these readings took a toll on him, both emotionally and physically, leading his doctor to advise him to cease the readings due to their exhausting nature.

Dickens builds character from a repeated set of gestures, phrases, and metaphors. For instance; In "Hard Times," Dickens consistently associates Mr. Gradgrind with the concept of squareness, reflecting not only his physical attributes but also his personality and worldview. This repetition of the square motif helps to establish Mr. Gradgrind's character traits and contributes to the overall thematic exploration of utilitarianism and rigidity in the novel. It marks many elements of his novels—their baggy plots, filled with incidents; the constant metaphorical invention of their language; and the multitude of their characters. Dickens builds characters through a repeated set of gestures, phrases, and metaphors. For instance, Mr. Gradgrind in 'Hard Times' is consistently associated with the squareness of his physical attributes. As Dickens's career progresses, his fiction becomes increasingly complex. Within this complexity, the recurring traits that characterize his characters take on deeper meanings, symbolizing emotional fixations and societal distortions. In Dickens's early fiction, there is a celebration of human peculiarities through comedic exaggeration. However, as his career progresses, this comedy transforms into grotesque portrayals, where the distortions of caricature mirror the failures of humanity in his darkening social vision. Shaw suggests that although Dickens didn't see himself as a revolutionary figure, his work had revolutionary implications. This implies that while Dickens may not have intentionally set out to incite revolution, his writings had a profound impact on social consciousness and reform.

As Dickens's career progressed, he became more urgent and explicit in his social criticism. This is evidenced by his choice of subtitle for "Hard Times" and his dedication of the book to Thomas Carlyle. The dedication to Carlyle, a renowned social critic, indicates Dickens's ambition to follow in Carlyle's footsteps and contribute to the tradition of social indictment through literature. The distinctiveness of Dickens's fiction is so pronounced that critics often discuss it as if the individual worlds of all his novels were continuous. Dickens's tendency to repeatedly explore subjects that captivated his imagination contributes to this perception. One such subject is prisons. "A Visit to Newgate" is his earliest work on this topic, to which he returns many times in novels such as "Great Expectations," "Oliver Twist," "The Pickwick Papers," and "Little Dorrit." For Dickens, prisons represent a particular social injustice, the most distressing setting in which to contemplate criminality and guilt. They serve as a metaphor for the psychological captivity his characters create for themselves and the system through which society enforces its discipline. Throughout his fiction, key elements of Victorian society, like prisons, acquire multiple layers of significance.