Cultural studies

Postcolonial studies:

Postcolonial refers to a historical phase undergone by third world countries after the decline of colonialism: for example, when countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean separated from the European empires and were left to rebuild themselves. Many third world writers focus on both colonialism and the changes created in a postcolonial culture. Among the many challenges facing postcolonial writers are the attempts both to resurrect their culture and to combat the pre-conceptions about their culture.

At first glance postcolonial studies would seem to be matter of history and political science, rather than literary criticism. However, we must remember that English, as in “English Department” or “English literature”, has been since the age of the British Empire a global language. Britain seemed to foster in its political institution as well as in literature universal ideals for proper living, while at the same time perpetuating the violent   enslavement of Africans and other imperialist cruelties around the World, causing untold misery and destroying millions of lives. Postcolonial literary theorist study the English language within this politicized context especially those writings that developed at the colonial “front”, such as work by Rudyard Kipling , E.M.Foster ,Jean Rhys, or Jamaica Kincaid. Earlier figures such as the Empire Writes Back, edited by Bill Ashcroft and other, and The Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy have radically remapped cultural criticism.

   Said’s concept of orientalism was an important touchstone to postcolonial studies, as he described the stereotypical discourse about the east as constructed by the west. this discourse rather than realistically portraying eastern  “others” constructs them based upon western anxieties and preoccupation Said sharply critiques the western image of the oriental as “irrational,depraved,child-like’different.which has allowed the west to define itself as” rational, virtuous, mature, normal; To describe the Us-and-Them binary social relation with which Western Europe intellectually divided the world into “Occident” and “Orient”, the cultural critic Edward W. Said developed the denotations and connotations of the term Orientalism. That the cultural representations generated with the Us-and-Them binary relation are social constructs, which are mutually constitutive and cannot exist independent of each other, because each exists on account of and for the other. Notably, “The West” created the cultural concept of “The East”, which allowed the European suppression of the ability of the peoples of the Middle East, of the Indian Subcontinent, and of Asia, to express and represent themselves as discrete peoples and cultures. Orientalism thus conflated and reduced the non–Western world into the homogeneous cultural entity known as “The East”. Therefore, in service to the colonial type of imperialism, the Us-and-Them Orientalist paradigm allowed Europeans scholars to misrepresent the Oriental World as inferior and backward, irrational and wild, whilst misrepresenting Western Europe as superior and progressive, as rational and civil, as the opposite of the Oriental Other. In a review of Saïd's Orientalism, A. Madhavan asserts that "Saïd's passionate thesis in that book, now an 'almost canonical study', represented Orientalism as a 'style of thought' based on the antinomy of East and West in their world-views and also as a 'corporate institution for dealing with the Orient."

Frantz Fanon, a French Caribbean Marxist, drew upon his own horrific experiences in French Algeria to deconstruct emerging national retimes that are based on inheritances from the imperial power, warning that class ,no race is a greater factor in worldwide oppression, and that if new nations are built in the molds of their former oppressors, then they will perpetuate the bourgeois inequalities from the past. his book the wretched of the Earth(1961) has been an impart ant inspiration for postcolonial cultural critics and literary critics who seek to understand the decolonizing project of third world writers, especially those interested in African and African American texts.

Homi k Bhabha’s postcolonial theory involves analysis of nationality,  ethnicity and politics with poststructuralist ideas of identity and indeterminacy, defining postcolonial identities as shifting, hybrid constructions. Bhabha critiques the presumed dichotomies between center and periphery, colonized and colonizer, self and other borrowing from deconstruction the argument that these are false binaries. He  proposes instead a dialogic model of nationalities , ethnicities and identities characterized by what he calls hybridity that is they are some thing new, emerging from a ”Third space” to interrogate the givens of the past. perhaps his most important contribution has been to stress that because it involves an interaction between colonizer and colonized. The old  distinction between “industrialized” and “developing” nations does not hold true today, when so many industrial jobs have been moved overseas from countries like the united state to countries like India and the Philippines.

Homi Bhabha, as a postcolonialist, tries to deal with the in-between categories of cultural differences across race, class, gender and, cultural traditions. Bhabha believes there is always ambivalence at the site of colonial dominance.  This means, "in reality any simple binary opposition between 'colonizers' and 'colonised' or between races is undercut by the fact that there are enormous cultural and racial differences within each of these categories as well as cross- overs".  The terms hybridity and ambivalence are used by Bhabha to explain "the fuzziness and ambiguity of" the construction of an Other.  Indigenous peoples are thrust into identities formed through the dominant culture's political and social ideals.  Indigenous people are slaves to their indifference which is created in language.  The vast number of indigenous cultural groups is herded into generic constructions of identity.  They share certain constructs but at the same time differ in ways which language is incapable or unwilling to recognize.  The indigenous groups are invited into the dominant culture but never become completely immersed into it resulting in the sustaining of authority by the colonizer.

 "Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order" Bhabha believes language creates an internal dissonance through a naturalized reflection of performative cultural articulation.  The method by which the dominant group maintains a Euro-centric sphere of authority is through the manipulation of language.  Bhabha states, through language "resistance is a condition produced by the dominant discourse itself... colonial discourse is not all powerful.  Identity is always in constant flux making no unified self.  The split hybrid colonial subject can exist anywhere in the colonial world.  He is undifferentiated by gender, class or location".  Without the other there is no authority, so through hybridization an Other is formed which the Euro-centric world may rule over.  The indigenous other can not escape the boundaries of colonial discourse.  Postcolonialists believe, "skin colour has become the privileged marker of races which are thought of either 'black' or 'white' but never big-eared' and 'small-eared'.  The fact that only certain physical characteristics are signified to define 'races' in specific circumstances indicates that we are investigating not a given, natural division of the world's population, but the application of historically and culturally specific meanings.

Postcolonial critics accordingly study diasporic texts outside the usual western genres, especially productions by aboriginal authors, marginalized ethnicities, immigrants and refugees. Postcolonial literatures from emerging nations by such writers as Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie are read alongside European responses to colonialism by writers such as George Orwell and Albert campus. We can see some powerful conflict arising from the colonial past in Rushdie’s midnight’s children (1980), for example, which deconstructc from a postcolonial view point the history of modern India.

Among the most important figures in postcolonial feminism is Gayatri chakravorty spivak, who examines the effects of political independence upon “subaltern” or sub proletarian woman in the third world- spivak’s subaltern studies reveal between the male- dominated west and the subaltern woman’s voice to rise up amidst the global social institutions that oppress her.

Spivak also introduced the terms essentialism and strategic essentialism to describe the social functions of post-colonialism. The term essentialism denotes the perceptual dangers inherent to reviving subaltern voices in ways that might simplify the cultural identity of heterogeneous social groups, and, thereby, create stereotyped representations of the different identities of the people who compose a given social group. The term strategic essentialism denotes a temporary, essential group-identity used in the praxis of discourse among peoples. Furthermore, essentialism can occasionally be applied — by the so-described people — to facilitate the subaltern’s communication in being heeded, heard, and understood, because a strategic essentialism  is more readily grasped, and accepted, by the popular majority, in the course of inter-group discourse. The important distinction, between the terms, is that strategic essentialism does not ignore the diversity of identity and ethnicsentialism temporarily minimizes inter-group diversity to pragmatically support the essential group-identity.

Spivak developed and applied Michel Foucault’s term epistemic violence to describe the destruction of non–Western ways of perceiving the world, and the resultant dominance of the Western ways of perceiving the world. Conceptually, epistemic violence specifically relates to women, whereby the “Subaltern must always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself”, because the colonial power’s destruction of her culture pushed to the social margins her non–Western ways of perceiving, understanding, and knowing the world.

As noted in the previous section, globalization has a sustained engagement with and Influence on local cultures. Some critics have argued that we need to address the role Of globalization through the postcolonial lens. Since postcolonial studies is concerned, as the chapter on theories explores, the oppression of non-European races by European ones, Cultural Studies in a globalization age also needs to be conscious of the radicalized nature of globalized/globalizing culture. That is, the theme of race and u equal relations has to be worked into any analysis of global cultures. For instance, we need to ask how Hollywood films circulate globally. Does the fact that audiences maker? How does a Hollywood film appear to poorer nations in these areas of the world? Think of films like Romancing the Stone, Indiana Jones and Blood Diamond which explore other cultures how are these conceived by Americans and received by other parts of the world?

What this means is: culture is increasingly mediated by economic factors. Culture has increasingly little to do with traditions or territories. Global economic and media flows determine what aspects of culture are across the world are determined less by local conditions and values than a circulation of global fashion patterns. In India, for instance, in the heavily mediated cultural context of the present, the elite/wealthy members of society can have access to Yves St. Laurent or a Chanel line because these are now available. Cultures and traditions are therefore modified not with the local culture in mind but with global patterns. Their choices are determined by the global economy.

Local cultures are linked to global economies, markets and needs, and hence any study of contemporary culture hat to examine the role of a non-local market/money-which requires a postcolonial awareness of the role of racial difference, the colonial relationship between ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ and the exploitative relationship between the two worlds even today.

What does such a link between postcolonial studies/theory mean for cultural Studies in a globalizing age?  This approach makes us ask certain question:

Are local cultural products in any way determined by the possibility of a global market?

Are such cultural products financed by non-local moneys?

How are you such products, rooted in local traditions circulated and marketed globally?

Even though globalization products ‘hybrid’ products and cultural values, the question of economic gain must underwrite our analysis of even these products. Thus wee need to keep in mind that global material goods and products are manufactured in south and south East Asian sweatshops –where employees that are both global and local, and generate profits for ‘First World’ companies. This analysis therefore is firmly rooted in a postcolonial prespecti.Local cultural artifacts are now ‘produced’ keeping a global market in mind. This ‘production’ of local culture is often engaged in a relationship with the first world. The relationship between local cultural is exploited or eroticized by the First World.

As a field of inquiry, post colonialism asks both how unequal relationships of political power are represented in cultural institutions such as literature, art, popular media, and the academy and how these representations work to create, destabilize, or understand the differences between individuals and among social groups. Its critical theories endeavor to come to terms with the legacy of the modern era's racism, primitivism, territorial conquest, sexual exploitation, slavery, and mass violence, as well as the influence of that legacy on the contemporary world.

Literary theory and criticism

Marxist:

A type of literary criticism based on the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. In its simplest form, Marxist criticism attempts to show the relationship between literature and the social—mainly economic—conditions under which it was produced. Originally, Marxist critics focused on literary representations of workers and working classes. For later Marxists, however, literature became a document of a kind of knowledge and a record of the historical conditions that produced that knowledge. Like cultural criticism, Marxist literary criticism offers critiques of the “canon” and focuses on the ways in which culture and power intersect; for a Marxist critic, literature both reproduces existing power relations and offers a space where they can be contested and redefined. Important 20th-century Marxist literary critics include Georg Lucáks, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams, and Frederic Jameson.

           

Much of what is wrong with the world today is explicable in Marxist terms, i.e., as consequences of allowing profit motivation to determine production and distribution, which is what happens when a few capitalists own all the capital The inevitable result is production of the most profitable things, not the most needed things. In a world where there is enormous inequality this means investment goes into producing consumer goods and luxuries for people in rich countries, while the needs of billions of people are more or less ignored. It means the rich few take most of the available resources because they can pay more for them  it means that much Third World productive capacity, especially land, goes into producing crops for export to rich countries when it should be producing food for hungry people.

Similarly, much that is wrong in the richest countries is explicable in these same terms. We have great need for the production of many goods, such as cheap housing, but these things are not produced while there is excessive production of many luxuries and trivial items -- because this is what maximizes return on private capital.

Unemployment and automation are problems in this economy simply because capital is privately owned. If a better machine is invented the capitalist who owns the factory receives all the benefit, while the workers lose their jobs. So of course there is a problem. In a socialist economy the machine could be adopted without these effects. All would share in more free time or cheaper goods. Similarly the only way a capitalist society can solve the unemployment problem is to find more things for displaced workers to produce, when we already produce much more than we need.

These phenomena are well described by the Marxist term "contradictions". Capitalist society inevitably involves huge contradictions because the forces of production clash with the relations of production. A good example is the fact that the world could easily feed all people yet hundreds of millions are hungry while 1/3 of the world's grain production is fed to animals in rich countries. We have the productive capacity to solve this problem but this is not done because it is not in the interests of those who control capital. They make more money selling the grain for feedlot beef production. In other words, if you allow society's capital to be privately owned then you will inevitably run into this sort of contradiction because often what s most profitable for capitalists to invest in is not what most needs doing. An alternative economy might not necessarily eliminate all free enterprise or private capital, but it would involve control and monitoring of private enterprise to ensure that most investment goes where it is most needed.

       

Eco-criticism:

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment. Just as feminist criticism examines language and literature from a gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies.

Ecocritics and theorists ask questions like the following: How is nature represented in this sonnet? What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel? Are the values expressed in this play consistent with ecological wisdom? How do our metaphors of the land influence the way we treat it? How can we characterize nature writing as a genre? In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category? Do men write about nature differently than women do? In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind's relationship to the natural world? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In what ways and to what effect is the environmental crisis seeping into contemporary literature and popular culture? What view of nature informs U.S. government reports, and what rhetoric enforces this view? What bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies? How is science itself open to literary analysis? What cross-fertilization is possible between literary studies and environmental discourse in related disciplines such as history, philosophy, psychology, art history, and ethics?

Despite the broad scope of inquiry and disparate levels of sophistication, all ecological criticism shares the fundamental premise that human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting it and affected by it. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts language and literature. As a critical stance, it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman.

Ecocriticism can be further characterized by distinguishing it from other critical approaches. Literary theory, in general, examines the relations between writers, texts, and the world. In most literary theory "the world" is synonymous with society--the social sphere. Ecocriticism expands the notion of "the world" to include the entire ecosphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner's first law of ecology, that "Everything is connected to everything else," we must conclude that literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether, but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex global system, in which energy, matter, and ideas interact.

Most ecocritical work shares a common motivation: the troubling awareness that we have reached the age of environmental limits, a time when the consequences of human actions are damaging the planet's basic life support systems. This awareness sparks a sincere desire to contribute to environmental restoration, not just in our spare time, but from within our capacity as professors of literature. Historian Donald Worster argues that humanities scholars have an important role to play:

We are facing a global crisis today, not because of how ecosystems function but rather because of how our ethical systems function. Getting through the crisis requires understanding our impact on nature as precisely as possible, but even more, it requires understanding those ethical systems and using that understanding to reform them. Historians, along with literary scholars, anthropologists, and philosophers, cannot do the reforming, of course, but they can help with the understanding. Literary scholars specialize in questions of value, meaning, tradition, point of view, and language, and it is in these areas that we are making a substantial contribution to environmental thinking.

In my view, an ecologically focused criticism is a worthy enterprise primarily because it directs our attention to matters about which we need to be thinking. Consciousness raising is its most important task. Ecocritics encourage others to think seriously about the relationship of humans to nature, about the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas posed by the environmental crisis, and about how language and literature transmit values with profound ecological implications.

Psychoanalytic criticism:

Dictionary definition:

a. The method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts, in order to free psychic energy for mature love and work.

b. The theory of personality developed by Freud that focuses on repression and unconscious forces and includes the concepts of infantile sexuality, resistance, transference, and division of the psyche into the id, ego, and superego.

c. Psychotherapy incorporating this method and theory.

Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses. One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author's psyche.

One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, "The dream-thoughts which we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech".

Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions, psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a disunified literary work. The author's own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded through principles such as "symbolism" "condensation”, and "displacement".

Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New Criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author intended." But what the author never intended is, rep is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted by the censoring conscious mind.

Psychoanalytic critics will ask such questions as, "What is Hamlet's problem?"

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud spent much of his life exploring the workings of the unconscious. Freud's work has influenced society in ways which we take for granted. When we speak of Freudian slips or look for hidden causes behind irrational behavior, we are using aspects of Freudian analysis. Many literary critics have also adopted Freud's various theories and methods.

Diaspora:

            Definitions of Diaspora – dispersion, homeland orientation, boundary maintenance. This is perhaps too succinct for my purpose as it lacks the crucial aspect of ongoing links in between members of the Diaspora in different locations and also with the homeland. four criteria, which a potential diaspora needs to satisfy in order to be placed within the diaspora circle.

.           Movement from an original homeland to more than one country, either through dispersal or expansion in search of improved livelihoods;

.           A collective myth of an ideal ancestral home;

.           A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time, based on a shared history, culture and religion; and

.           A sustained network of social relationships with members of the group living in different countries of settlement.summarised as:

1.         Dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically;

2.         Alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work, in pursuit of trade or to further colonial ambitions;

3.         A collective memory and myth about the homeland;

4.         An idealization of the supposed ancestral home;

5.         A return movement or at least a continuing connection;

6.         A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time;

7.         A troubled relationship with host societies;

8.         A sense of co‐responsibility with co‐ethnic members in other countries; and

9.         The possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host societies.

         

            If the term Diaspora is to have any analytical value and also retain its descriptive power, it needs to be reserved for particular people living in distinctive relationships with each other and a homeland. Not all migrants become Diasporas and not all Diasporas can be considered as migrants’ .Likewise, not all those who engage in transnational practices are necessarily Diasporas; they may simply be operating as networks of people with limited relationships to any place. Nyberg‐Sorenson suggests that study of transnational and Diaspora can be distinguished by their relationship to place:

Migrants’ transnational practices have been understood to dissolve fixed assumptions about identity, place and community, whereas Diasporas’ identity‐making has been understood to evolve around attempts to ‘fix’ and closely knit identity and community. 

The Victorian literature

                   Dickens as a socialist:

Dickens was not only the first great urban novelist in England, but also one of the most important social commentators who used fiction effectively to criticize economic, social, and moral abuses in the Victorian era. Dickens showed compassion and empathy towards the vulnerable and disadvantaged segments of English society, and contributed to several important social reforms. Dickens’s deep social commitment and awareness of social ills are derived from his traumatic childhood experiences when his father was imprisoned in the Marshal sea Debtors’ Prison under the Insolvent Debtors Act of 1813, and he at the age of twelve worked in a shoe-blacking factory. In his adult life Dickens developed a strong social conscience, ability to empathies with the victims of social and economic injustices. In a letter to his friend Willkie Collins dated September 6, 1858, Dickens writes of the importance of social commitment:

“Everything that happens […] shows beyond mistake that you can’t shut out the world; that you are in it, to be of it; that you get yourself into a false position the moment you try to sever yourself from it; that you must mingle with it, and make the best of it, and make the best of yourself into the bargain” (Marlow, 132).

Dickens believed in the ethical and political potential of literature, and the novel in particular, and he treated his fiction as a springboard for debates about moral and social reform. In his novels of social analysis Dickens became an outspoken critic of unjust economic and social conditions. His deeply-felt social commentaries helped raise the collective awareness of the reading public. Dickens contributed significantly to the emergence of public opinion which was gaining an increasing influence on the decisions of the authorities. Indirectly, he contributed to a series of legal reforms, including the abolition of the inhumane imprisonment for debts, purification of the Magistrates’ courts, a better management of criminal prisons, and the restriction of the capital punishment.

The Novel a Repository of Social Conscience:

Dickens was a great moralist and a perceptive social commentator. He was by no means completely under the influence of Carlyle, but he followed his teaching when he exposed the ills of Victorian society. Although his fiction was not politically subversive, he called to remedy acute social abuses. After Dickens’s death his social theory was long regarded as oversimplified, but as Jane Smiley pointed out in The Guardian, in recent years it has been reassessed:

For example, in the 1960s and 70s, the era of the new left, Dickens was considered well-meaning but naive; his “programme” was thought to be poorly worked out and inconsistent — not Marxist enough (though Marx was a great fan of Dickens). After Marxism went out of fashion, Dickens’s amorphous social critique came to seem more universally true because it was not programmatic but based on feelings of generosity and brotherhood combined with specific criticisms of practices common in England during his lifetime.

Dickens was not the first novelist to draw attention of the reading public to the deprivation of the lower classes in England, but he was much more successful than his predecessors in exposing the ills of the industrial society including class division, poverty, bad sanitation, privilege and meritocracy and the experience of the metropolis. In common with many nineteenth-century authors, Dickens used the novel as a repository of social conscience.

The Condition of England:

            In The Pickwick Papers (1837) Dickens created a utopian and nostalgic vision of pre-Victorian and pre-industrial England prior to a rapid industrialization and urbanization. Although the novel was designed to be comic, it is not free of Dickens’s characteristic social commentary, which would become more pronounced in his later novels. The descriptions of Eatanswill (Chapter 13) and the grim Fleet prison (Chapter 41) anticipate some of Dickens’s preoccupations with the Condition of England, which are revealed in his subsequent novels dealing with the darker and more disgusting side of Victorian times. The following passage from The Pickwick Papers anticipates Dickens’s lifelong concern with the effects of industrialization on English society.

Dickens’s later novels contain some of his most trenchant pieces of social commentary. Beginning with his second novel, Oliver Twist, through Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Hard Times, and ending with Little Dorrit, Dickens totally rejected the claims of classical economics and showed his moral concern for the social well-being of the nation. His early novels expose isolated abuses and shortcomings of individual people, whereas his later novels contain a bitter diagnosis of the Condition of England.

Oliver Twist (1837-39), which represents a radical change in Dickens’s themes, is his first novel to carry a social commentary similar to that contained in the subsequent Condition-of-England novels. According to Louis Cazamian, “the success of Twist confirmed Dickens’ determination to write on social topics, and the inception of Chartism means that the burning social issue of the day was the problem of the working class ” (164). Dickens explores many social themes inOliver Twist, but three are predominant: the abuses of the new Poor Law system, the evils of the criminal world in London and the victimisation of children. The critique of the Poor Law of 1834 and the administration of the workhouse is presented in the opening chapters of Oliver Twist. Dickens gives the most uncompromising critique of the Victorian workhouse, which was run according to a regime of prolonged hunger, physical punishment, humiliation and hypocrisy.

In contrast to Pickwick, in Oliver Twist Dickens shows England as a country of what Disraeli called “the two nations”: the rich and privileged and the poor living in abject and inhumane conditions of deprivation, misery and humiliation. Many characters of Oliver Twist function as allegories. Dickens challenges the popular Victorian beliefs that some people are more prone to vice than others. Like Frances Trollope, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Charlotte Brontë andElizabeth Gaskell, Dickens was fully aware of the victimization of women in Victorian society. Nancy is forced into prostitution by poverty, hunger and life in a corrupt environment. John Bayley points out that

Nancy’s living is the living of England, a nightmare society in which drudgery is endless and stupefying, in which the natural affections are warped, and the dignity of man appears only in resolution and violence. It is a more disquieting picture than the carefully and methodically symbolized social panoramas of Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend.

In Oliver Twist Dickens presents a portrait of the macabre childhood of a considerable number of Victorian orphans. The orphans are underfed, and for a meal they are given a single scoop of gruel. Oliver, one of the oppressed children, dares to ask for more gruel and is severely punished.

This scene has become “the most familiar incident in any English novel” (Sanders, 412), strongly appealed to the Victorian conscience. Dickens challenged the Victorian idea of charity for the so-called “deserving poor”. He showed persuasively that the workhouse was a failed attempt to solve the problem of poverty and unwanted children. Oliver Twist can be read as a textbook of Victorian child abuse and a social document about early Victorian slum life. When Oliver goes with Sowerberry to fetch the body of a woman dead of starvation, he can see an appalling view of derelict slum houses.

Dickens succeeded in making Victorian public opinion more aware of the conditions of the poor. He depicted persuasively the disorder, squalor, blight, decay, and the human misery of a modern industrial city. Although the initial condition of England discourse changes into a sentimental moral fable on the subsequent pages, Oliver Twist is an important manifestation of Victorian social conscience.

            The motif of child abuse in the context the Victorian education system is continued in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9). The novel contains a serious social commentary on the conditions of schools where unwanted children were maltreated and starved. Nicholas is sent to Dotheboys Hall, a school run by the cruel and abusive headmaster Wackford Squeers.

The novel directs this ironical attack at Victorian public opinion, which was either unaware or condoned such treatment of poor children. Dickens was critical about the Victorian education system, which is reflected not only inNicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend, but also in his journalism and public speeches. As a boy he was shocked to read reports about the cheap boarding schools in the North. In Nicholas Nickleby Dickens describes abusive practices in Yorkshire boarding schools. However, Dickens does not only criticise the malicious education system, but he is primarily concerned with the fates of these unfortunate children who are representatives of the most vulnerable portion of the society.

Dickens’s novella, A Christmas Carol (1843), is an anti-Malthusian tale. The author shows his disgust with the Malthusian principle of uncontrolled population growth. Scrooge speaks about charity collector like Malthus, who proposed abolition of poor laws:

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

.Although Dickens’s early works implied faith in the new commercial middle class as opposed to the old aristocracy, the writer saw the discrepancy between the ideas and practice of this new class and the principles of morality and ethic. As a social commentator, Dickens saw the need for the reform of English society; he urged that the wealthy and privileged exhibit a greater humanitarianism towards the poor and the vulnerable.

During the 1850s Dickens’s interests shifted gradually from the examination of individual social ills to the examination of the state of society, particularly its laws, education, industrial relations, the terrible conditions of the poor. Increasingly, apart from fictional plots, his novels contained a considerable amount of social commentary similar to Henry Mayhew’s nonfictional narratives about the London poor.

            Although Bleak House (1852-53) is often called England’s first authentic contribution to modern detective fiction, it also sharply indicts the inequities in Victorian society. Dickens’s finest novel, although not his most popular, it exposes the abuses of the court of Chancery and administrative incompetence. For Dickens, the Court of Chancery became synonymous with the faulty law system, expensive court fees, bureaucratic practices, technicality, delay and inconclusiveness of judgments. Apart from the critique of the Chancery courts, Dickens also criticizes slum housing, overcrowded urban graveyards, and neglect of contagious diseases, electoral corruption, preachers; class divisions, and neglect of the educational needs of the poor. The book opens with the famous description of London in fog.

The social consequences of industrialization and urbanization are perhaps most persuasively depicted in Hard Times (1854), which Dickens wrote at the prompting of urgent external circumstances. Hard Times is more than any other of his Condition-of-England novels influenced by Carlyle’s social criticism. It deals with a number of social issues: industrial relations, education for the poor, class division and the right of common people to amusement. It also draws on contemporary concern with reforming divorce laws. Cazamian sees Dickens in Hard Times as an “intermediary link between the social thought of Carlyle and Ruskin.” (173) Raymond Williams described Hard Times as “a thorough-going and creative examination of the dominant philosophy of industrialism — of the hardness that Mrs. Gaskell saw as little more than a misunderstanding, which might be patiently broken down” (93). Similarly, in his study, “The Rhetoric of Hard Times”, David Lodge wrote:

On every page Hard Times manifests its identity as a polemical work, a critique of mid-Victorian industrial society dominated by materialism, acquisitiveness, and ruthlessly competitive capitalist economics. To Dickens, at the time of writing Hard Times, these things were represented most articulately, persuasivel by the Utilitarians.

The target of Dickens’s criticism, however, was neither Bentham’s Utilitarianism, nor Malthusian theories of population, nor Smith’s free-market economics, but the crude utilitarianism derived from such ideas by Benthamite Philosophical Radicals, which tended to dominate social, political, and economic thinking and policy at the time the novel was written.

Dickens as a social commentator exerted a profound influence on later novelists committed to social analysis. Some of his concerns with the Condition-of-England Question were further dealt with in the novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, George Gissing, George Orwell, and recently in the postmodern novels of Martin Amis and Zadie Smith.