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Charles Dickens - Summary Only Connect

Lingua e letteratura inglese (Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II)

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CHARLES DICKENS

Life and works

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had un unhappy childhood, since his father
went to prison and he had to work in a factory at the age of 12.
When he become conscious of his talent for writing, he learned shorthand becoming a journalist at
the Parliament and Law Courts. He started describing London society in a collection of articles and,
later, in the Pickwick Papers, he also demonstrated his inclination for humour and satire. So,
probably starting from his criticism in journalism he developed his satirical style in novels.
His success developed with the publication of Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1849-50)
which drew on his own childhood and journalism. He exposed the exploited lives of children in the
slums of factories. Other novels include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and Great
Expectations (1860-61). These works are built against the background of social issues, underlining
the condition of the poor and working class.
During his last years he finally approached to theatre, providing dramatic readings of his works. He
died in 1870.

The plots of Dickens’s novels

Dickens was first and foremost a storyteller, whose formation had been influenced by the Bible,
fairy tales, fables, nursery rhymes, 18th century and Gothic novels.
His plots revealed very well-planned, although sometimes betrayed by quite irrelevant artificial,
sentimental or episodic elements. But it is not acceptable to build a critic upon this, because it is
necessary to remember the conditions of publication he ha to respect, like the printing in
instalments, that discouraged unified plotting, and the need to suite the public taste.
Because of the drawing on autobiographical material, the setting was mainly London, well-know by
the writer.
The process of his writing can be divided into two moments:
1. He created middle-class characters, often satirised.
However, he gradually developed a more radical social view, though never revolutionary.
Indeed, he believed in reforms and philanthropy, not rebellion.
2. In his mature works, he succeeded in drawing popular attention to public abuses, evils and
wrongs by juxtaposing terrible descriptions of the misery and crime in London with
amusing sketches. So sarcasm (irony and blame) prevails on satire (humorous and
fictitious). This last part of his career is signed by the attempt to educate his readers trying
to give impulse to a regeneration of English system.

Characters

Dickens creates caricatures. Critics found this mechanism to compromise realism. However, in a
certain sense, Dickens needed exaggerating and ridiculing peculiar social characteristics in order to
achieve the satire against middle, lower and lowest classes and he succeeded in this by using their
own voices and dialogues and through the creation of idiolects.

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He was always on the side of the poor and the outcast, although he name them as “the less
fortunate”; moreover, as he will suggest their education through his stories, he nearly seems
depriving the proletariat of the capability to defend their own selves. Anyhow, he promoted a shift
of the social frontiers of the novel, from the 18th century upper-middle class world to the lower
orders.

A didactic aim

Dickens reverses the natural and traditional order of thing, by giving examples of moral and good
children (most important characters) against worthless and hypocritical adults. Putting them
forward as models of a correct behaviour, he makes his children be loved by the readers.
This didactic stance was very effective, since the wealthier and the more educated of English
acquired a knowledge of their poor neighbours of which they knew nothing about.
However, Dickens’s task was never to promote revolution or aliment discontent, while to get the
common intelligence of the country to alleviate unsolvable sufferings.

Style and reputation

Critics define Dickens as the founder of the “social novel”, resulting from the mixture of the 18th
century realistic inclination, that he reaches because of his own experience of poor’s hardship, and
the romantic sentimentalist vein.
The technique he uses seems to anticipate the future developments of the novel, since he makes
use of different narrators: omniscient, external or identified within a character.
As for the language, it proves really effective thanks to the powerful descriptions, the careful
choice od adjectives, the juxtaposition of images and ideas and the hyperbolic and ironic remarks.

Oliver Twist – 1838

Plot

Oliver Twist first appeared in 1837 in instalments. The novel fictionalizes the economic insecurity
and humiliation the author himself had experiences in his childhood. Indeed, the material he
works on is historical, but fictionalized when transfigured in the narration.
According to Dickens’s style, right the name, “Twist” (a sudden change of situation), represents the
outrageous reversals of fortune the protagonist will experience.
He is an orphan, brought up in a workhouse in an inhuman way: here the writer points his fingers
of blame against the managers of those places. He is sold to an undertaker as an apprentice, but,
because of the cruelty he suffers, Oliver escape to London: in the “city of crime”, the most
representative setting used by Dickens, he’s repeatedly victim of a gang of pickpockets. Than he’s
adopted by a middle-class family that shows kindness and affection towards the child: here is
evident the author’s didactic aim since he gives some the function to help and elevate the poor.
The happy ending sees the discovery of Oliver’s noble origins and the imprisonment of the
members of the gang, this way respecting the still canonical system of punishment and reward.

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London’s life

He depicts London at three different social levels:

1. The parochial world of workhouses (ran by parishes), whose inhabitants belong to the
lower-middle-stratum; they are insensible and calculating.
2. The criminal world. Seeming trying a justification, Dickens sustains crime caused by poverty
and achieved through the weapon of violence. The living condition of those belonging to
this level of society are dirty and squalid, dominated by fear and miserable death.
3. The Victorian middle-class. Differently from the last part of his production, here Dickens
doesn’t still points his fingers of blame against them, presented as respectable people with
care for moral values and human dignity.

The world of the workhouse

With the rise of the level of poverty, workhouses, run by parishes, spread all over England to give a
sort of “relief” to the poor. Instead, conditions there were inhuman and appalling: over issues such
as health and hygiene, regulations they were imposed turned to be dramatic. Poor found
themselves much more imprisoned than guest there, where they even suffered the separation
from their family. Moreover, they were hired up but their wage was to go in the hands of parishes
in exchange for a bad and meagre food and clothing.
The dominating idea at the basis of workhouses was still the puritan conception of poverty as a
consequence of laziness and so a sin: on the wake of this consideration, the terrible conditions in
workhouses would have urged poor to better their status.
Furthermore, the bad distribution of wealth coming from the Industrial Revolution made any
economic improvement impossible.
Finally, instead of alleviating sufferings, the managers of workhouses abused of their rights causing
further misery to the poor.

Hard Times – 1854

Plot

Coketown is the invented industrial town hosting the story and probably inspired to the existing
polluted city of Preston. Mr Gradgrind is one of the main characters and, as its name hints, he
represents the degeneration of the British school system towards which Dickens carries one of his
accuses. He is an educator who believes in facts and statistics into a perfect utilitarian inclination:
through Mr Gradgrind, that, as Swift’s protagonist, becomes both object and mean of criticism, the
author also questions Utilitarianism since it oppresses feelings, imagination and fancy as the two
children of Mr Gradgrind, Tom and Luisa, show after they’re brought up in the school founded by
their father. Attacking the hypocrisy of Victorians, Dickens tells about an unhappy but conventional
combined marriage between Luisa and Mr Bounderby, another character whose name evidences
the writer’s attitude against the bank system. The girl doesn’t opposes herself to this decision,
hoping it will help also her brother’s situation that, although employed in Mr Bounderby’s bank,

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proves lazy and selfish, robing and escaping from his responsibilities until forced to leave the
country.

Structure

Since the novel belongs to the second period of Dickens’s production, it is representative of the
complication of his style also in the structure: Hard Times is divided up in three sections, named
with terms of the agriculture, at their time separated into three chapters:
1. “Sowing”: Messrs Gradgrind and Bounderby’s education.
2. “Reaping”: Luisa’s unhappy marriage, Tom’s selfishness, Stephen’s rejection by Coketown.
3. “Garnering”: details.

A critique of materialism

In accordance to Dickens’ concern in social problems, Hard Times focuses in the differences of the
era existing between the loud and dangerous condition of the workers and the hypocrisy of the
factory owners. Since there was not yet any specialization of labour (so: not educated  not still
Trade Unions! 1871), the workers had few opportunities to improve their conditions. Denouncing
the gap between the rich and the poor, this novel criticize materialism and the narrow-mindedness
of Utilitarianism, suggesting that 19th- century England was turning human beings into machines by
avoiding the free expression of their feelings and imagination + loss of identities.
- Mr Gradgrind: educates his children and those of his school in the ways of facts and
believes that human nature can be measured and quantified and governed entirely by
rational rules.
- Mr Bounderby: is the emblem of factory owner who exploit his workers considering them
nothing but emotionless object.
So, Dickens’s aim is to illustrate the dangers coming from the metamorphosis of humans in to
machines: in one word, of alienation.

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