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Describe Dickens as a representative of his age.

Dickens’ writings / creation represent the social atmosphere of his age. Discuss.

Charles Dickens is the foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era. Born in lower-class society, Dickens was brought up in an atmosphere of adversity and educated in the school of suffering. He made his depute as a writer in 1833 with sketches by Boz. Then followed Pickwick and Fame! The next few years his literary output was simply prodigious. Pikwick Papers (1836-37) Oliver twist (1837 38), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), Old Curiosity Shop (1848-50), A Tale of Two Cities (1854), Great Expectations (1861), are some of his well known novels. Dickens became the most popular novelist of his time.

A pioneer-writer of lower middle-class society and of the life of the town-folk in their varied ways, Dickens is a social novelist as well as a social reformer, a writer who moralises with a smile on his lips portraying the quivering image of the anguised soul of poverty under the garb of realism, Dickens helped to intensify the suggestion of active charity. This is what made Dickens as apostle, and his work a gospel of humanitarianism. It is in this respect that Dickens’ work contributes to the idealistic reaction of the time. A staunch believer in progress, in a moderate outlook and in an optimistic turn of mind. Dickens is also a prophet of sentimentalism taking his stand agains the advocates of rationalism. He is a representative writer too, not merely because in some of his novels he portrays contemporary problems, but because his opinions and ideals were in complete accord with the middle-class opinions of his day. While the background of hi novels conforms with the life of a middle-class, his character delineation finds itself in harmony with typical English temperament Humour and humanity are two other outstanding characteristics of Dickens as a novelist. No other writer has touched with pity and tenderness the springs of English national life as Dickens has done Dickens is not a great and consummate literary artist, not a great psychological writer, not a thorough-going realist, not a reductive tale-teller, but he is the greatest of the national novelists of England. A man of the democratic novel. Happy be nighily, radient humanity, and intense sympathy mark off the novels of Dickens as great.

Charles Dickens dress on his own vivid and motey experience and intense observation for most of his material. His extraordinary, gift of comic creation respond with enormous gusto to the stimulus of such memories, but were sometimes less happily exercised upon” characters and topics beyond this range his amazing gallery of classical comic creations. Mrs. Gamp, the Micawbars, Pecksniff, and a score of others have become household words in England, and furnished new words to English speech. He drew the shady, recking purlicus of Bohemian London into the light of his searching vision and of his exuberant but kindly laughter, indulgent to the drunkard, hard to the hypocrite, keenly responsive to every gleam of good heart. The vulgar and sordid London of Dickens becomes in his hands as romantic as the Edinburgh of Scott. And like Fielding, but with more local color and individual accent, he made his own the roads and hostelries of the home countries. To the impersonality or the pure artist, for better or worse. he at no time affected to make any approach. Indignation, sometimes ignorant and naive, more often righteous and revealing, armed his pen when he exposed legal fraud. the horrors of the detors’ prisons and workhouse, educational cruelty. religious hypocrisy. He was the most powerful of the group who in “the hungry forties” made the “social novel” an organ for compelling reform. His generous propaganda sometimes injured his art, but his achievement in immensely enlarging the frontiers of the novel and of Sumour remains. To give it psychological depth and philosophical reach was the affairs of a later generation.

S. O. Neill has observed in this connection “the literary giant best fitted to feed this voracious, if inhibited, public was Charles Dickens, a sturdy individualist of no great depth of thought, but richly endowed with creative energy and showmanship. Dickens stands, by reason of the superb range of his characters, unrivalled among English novelists, and incites comparison with Dostoevski. Dickens is immortal because he is essentially of his time.” According to G. K. Chestorton “Dickens stands first as a defiant monument to what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens did no write what the people ted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted. And with this was connected that other fact which I have more than once insisted on, that Dickens and his school had a hilarious faith in democracy and thought of the service of it as a sacred priesthood. Hence, there was this vital point in his popularismi that there was condescension in it. The belief that the rabble will only read rabble can be read between the lines of all our contemporary writers, even of those writers whose rubbish the rabble reads. Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and hot blood. This in what makes an immortal bond between him and the masses of men. His power, then, lay in the fact that he expressed with energy and brilliantly quite uncommon the things close to the common mind.” Dickens represents in his novels the Victorian age as Tennyson represents in poetry. He reflected in his works the London of 1820 and 1830: society due to industrialization, electricity, rails, etc. He pictures the squalor and materialism of his age. He is a typical Victorian also because he wrote of the people and for the people of his age according to their taste and requirements. Like the Victorians, he detested hate. Dickens wanted what the people wanted. This commonness didn’t make an extraordinary novelist.