CHARLES DICKENS ( 1812-1870)
The author who probably best embodied all the features and the contradictions of Victorian Age
was Charles Dickens. He was deeply influenced by his own childhood experiences ,which shaped
his future sympathy for poor classes and produced melodramatic novels pervaded by social
awareness.
He was born in Portsmouth in 1812. His family moved to London where he started school . When
his father was arrested for debts and was sent in a debtors’ prison. Charles ,who was still a young
boy, was obliged to leave school and work in a factory. The factory was dirty and cold and he felt
deeply humiliated. His unhappy childood marked him for ever and influenced his novels. At the
age of fourteen he went to work as a clerk in a legal office.
He began his prolific career as a journalist , writing a series of humorous sketches of everyday
life,under the title of Sketches by Boz . He became a famous writer after the publication of his
Pickwick Papers, humorous stories, published in instalments, about a group of eccentric people
who met to recount their adventures. After the success of Pickwick papers , Dickens started a full-
time career as a novelist. He was deeply conscious of social injustice, political incompetence,
corruption , the poverty and sufferings of the masses. He had been defined a social writer
because through his so called humanitarian novels, he attacked the evils and vices of his age,
such as the workhouse system in Oliver Twist, the cruelty of the boarding schools in Nicholas
Nickeby , the sufferings of the factory system and the harm done by the utilitarianism in Hard
Times, the delays in the administration of justice in Bleak House, the Victorian love of money and
the lack of affections in Dombey and son, the horrible conditions of the prisons in Little Dorrit. He
also wrote a series of Christmas books , one of the most famous is A Christmas Carol. Other
important novels were David Copperfield ,mostly authobiographical, and Great Expectations.
Dickens’s novels present a variety of settings: the countryside,the provincial towns ,the industrial
settlements of the North, but the most typical setting is London. He was a great entertainer who
created unforgettable characters especially eccentric,vagabonds ,criminal and orphans. They are
mainly from the lower and middle classes while upper class and aristocratic are not described so
well. All His Characters are too easily divided into good and bad to become purely simbolic. In his
novels there are are plots and sub-plots,intrigue,mystery and incredibile coincidences.
He is very good at mixing social criticism with the lively description of universal characters
combining the pathetic with the comic. The most important characteristic of his style is his humor
through which he makes more accetable his melodramatic or didactic passages.
