Charles Dickens Research Paper

Dickens's comprehensive vision of the English society of his day is reflected in his fiction through a panoramic image that is as intricate as the actual world is . He attacks social deficiencies and abuses because he believes that these obstruct the growth of natural goodness, debase human dignity and impede human welfare . His attacks are directed towards identifiable institutions such as the debtors' prison , the workhouse , the Yorkshire school and the miserable condition of the London slums . His criticism extends to include the new , disturbing values that have become accepted in Victorian England , such as irresponsibility , the prevalence of materialistic values and the mechanization of human relationships .

The novel has become the main medium of thought expression . The decline of drama has assisted in the rise of the novel . Kathleen Tillotson indirectly suggests this by saying that , " some novelists in our period , notably Dickens , would have enjoyed being dramatists had the conditions of the theatre , financial and otherwise , been more favourable ". 7 That the Victorian novel reflects its own age will be emphatically suggested here . It is an age which has tremendously influenced literary trends to the extent that every major novel can be seen as a " response , direct or indirect to the current events of the time " .8 Some major novelists of the Victorian age have tried , as Defoe and Fielding had done before them , to reveal society to itself , a society that is so vast , diverse and unstable . But their response to the age has not been a unified one in spirit and it is futile to try to arrive at a definition that will cover the literary modes produced during the period .9 Dickens's criticism of social plights is extended from Domby and Son through Bleak House , it has its roots in Oliver Twist and even earlier than that

First purpose is to study the poverty in Oliver Twist in an industrialized society , which led to emerge new class of the capitalists . Dickens studies the roots and the reasons of poverty in his society . Dickens approach , in his novel , the impact of change on a society that is striving to adjust itself to new conditions . Novelist , like Dickens , has felt as if he was caught between the pull of nostalgia and the urge of new life and this sense of division , of belonging to two ages , has given rise to novels describing social change