Charles Dickens
He was the first successful English novelist. He had a very strong and direct relationship with his readers, who followed his novels instalment after instalment. He was the first to speak about contemporary social and ethical issues in a way that a vast audience could understand.
He had quite a difficult childhood; he lived in a poor area in London with his family and when he was still young, he was forced to leave school to go to work in a factory. Moreover, his father was sent to prison for debts and he found himself living alone on the streets of the capital with other poor boys. Such early experiences may have developed his peculiar attention for contemporary social and ethical issues such as poverty and social inequality. They also provided him with realistic events and characters for his future novels.
He worked as a clerk in a legal office and this experience made him develop a contempt for lawyers and institutions. He also worked as a reporter and as a journalist, writing about London and its people under the pen name of ‘Boz’. Through this experience he became deeply acquainted with different aspects of London and its inhabitants. David Copperfield – the protagonist of the novel by the same title – can be considered a semi-autobiographical figure, based on the author’s own experiences as a child.
He focused on crucial aspects of Victorian society, he was mostl critical and focused on the problems and contradictions of that time. Like Shakespeare, he created unforgettable characters. He was able to capture the typical gestures, habits and ways of living especially of the lower and middle classes. Another aspect which made his novels unforgettable is his use of humour. His weaknesses instead are the fact that his characters are often just stereotypes and the didactic tone of some passages.
OLIVER TWIST
It combines the sentimental story of a poor orphan living in London and exploited by a gang of thieves with social satire and realism. It focuses mainly on social issues such as the bad living conditions of orphans in workhouses and the life of young gangs on the streets of London. Institutions like workhouses and horphanages were places where poor people were supposed to find accommodation and employment, but their living conditions were so terrible that they were similar to prisons.
He uses satire to denounce social issues such as poverty and especially poor children’s bad living conditions; for example, he writes that ‘poor people should have the alternative ... of being starved by a gradual process in the house or by a quick one out of it.’
HARD TIMES
It’s set in a fictitious city called Coketown; coke is the name of a kind of coal, so the name itself stresses the fact that it’s an industrial city – that is, a probably polluted and overcrowded one. Mr Grandgrind is a teacher who founded a school where he could teach his materialistic and narrow-minded utilitarian philosophy; facts are the most important thing in life for him. He understands the damage that his philosophy of life can cause to his son and daughter. The book is also a critic against the Utilitarian philosphy of Jeremy Bentham- For Utilitarians workers were‘hands’, implying that they were not people but rather functions of the machines they operated. Everything had to be judged according to standards of utility. The material happiness of the greatest number of people was considered the main goal to achieve, but actually the working class that represented the greatest part of the population seemed to get no part of this happiness.