Charles Dickens: life and works
Charles Dickens (1812–1870) began working in a factory as a child after his father was imprisoned for debt and Dickens had to leave school. These experiences informed his attention to poverty, exploited children, and harsh social institutions. He first worked as a newspaper reporter and then became a successful fiction writer.
Life, novels, and publication
The account groups Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Little Dorrit as autobiographical novels about young people facing a cruel adult world. Hard Times and Great Expectations are presented as social novels criticizing Victorian society and working-class conditions. Serial publication made novels available in inexpensive installments, but could also encourage episodic plots, censorship, sentimentality, and melodrama.
Social criticism and style
Dickens sought to alert wealthy and educated readers to social injustice, including debtor’s prisons, workhouses, and repressive education. He criticized greed and hypocrisy, but did not advocate revolution; his stories often end with an ideal triumph of justice. His writing combines an omniscient narrator, fluent language and analogies, pathos, and grotesque comedy.
- In Oliver Twist, an orphan experiences the workhouse and a gang in London before being saved by Mr. Brownlow.
- In Hard Times, Mr. Gradgrind’s facts-based education suppresses imagination, and he eventually recognizes his failure as a teacher and father.