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.