CHARLES DICKENS Dickens is the most popular English novelist. He influenced many of his contemporaries and successors. Earlier critics tended to regard him as a great comic writer and entertainer. Contemporary critics now tend to see his works as combining social realism and symbolism. He is considered as a writer “not of an age but for all time.” CHARACTERS AND PLOTS Dickens replaced the 18th century realistic upper middle-class world with that of the lower orders. He created caricatures, trying to arouse the reader’s interest by describing the characters , habits, and language of the middle and lower classes in modern London. He depicted Victorian society in all its variety, its richness and its squalor. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast, and also the working class. His characters are unforgettable. Children are often the most important characters in his novels; they become the moral teachers, the examples. A fault frequently found with his characters is that they are too easily divided , into good and bad. As for the plots of his novels, they involve many characters, plot and sub-plots, intrigue, often mystery. THEMES OF DICKENS’S NOVELS The themes of Dickens’s novels are: family, childhood and poverty. Dickens was deeply conscious of social injustice, political incompetence ,the poverty and suffering of the masses. The result was an increasingly critical attitude towards contemporary society. He attacked the workhouses (Oliver Twist), the boarding schools, the factory system and the harm done by the utilitarian philosophy(Hard Times). SETTINGS OF HIS NOVELS Dickens’s most typical setting is London, which is depicted at three different social levels: the parochial world of the workhouses (lower middle class);the criminal world(murderers, pickpockets living in squalid slums); the Victorian middle-class ( respectable people believing in human dignity).
DICKENS’S STYLE In his novels, Dickens mixed social criticism with lively portraits of universal characters, combining pathos with the comic. The main strength of Dickens’s style is his humour. His main task was never to induce the most wronged and suffering to rebel, but to get the common intelligence of the country to alleviate sufferings.