Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens was a veteran novelist of the Victorian era who was greatly influenced by Smollett, Fielding and La Sage. He was a widely travelled person. But in spite of his greatness, he has been charged that he cannot construct and that his books have no organic unity, they are full of detachable episodes and that characters have no purpose in making the plot .His characters like Micawber, Betsy, Flora Finching, Mr. Crumbles etc. are almost irrelevant to the action. After pages of numerous discussions, Dickens remembers that there should be a plot. This is his defect as a novelist.
His books are full of melodrama. It is not a bad thing; rather it gives a thrill to his writings. The murder of Nancy in Oliver Twist, and Mr. Carker’s last journey through the stormy night are some of the brilliant inventions of Dickens. They move us because they give us thrill. They may not stir the emotion of pity and terror as done in the Shakespearean dramas, but they do move us and awake us with the real touch of life.
It is said that, Dickens’s most powerful weapon was his pathos. He had a natural gift of pathos. His characters are more or less conventional and down to earth types. To be frank, he could not draw complete, educated and aristocratic characters. On the other hand, he might not construct his story well, but he made the story lively. Most of his characters are from the lower and middle strata of the society. He portrayed them with a sense of pragmatism. Himself, being from a middle class background, he represents them authentically. For most of his life, he lived in and around London. Naturally, the ranges of his characters are mostly from this known area and they are mostly youths.
He was fascinated by the grotesque, by dwarfs and giants, by houses made of boats and bride cakes full of spiders. The slums of Oliver Twist, law courts of Bleak House, and the waterside of Our Mutual Friend-all these stimulated the fancies of Dickens to create such real characters. He was one of the best masters of the macabre. It does not arise from characters or situations.
His figures of terror like Fagin, Bill Sykes, Jonas, Chuzzlewit, Mr.Tulkinhorn etc. are also very normal characters. Dickens’s melodramatic and conventional inclinations are found everywhere. His characters are not kings and saints or brilliant men of rank and file, but they are obviously real men and women of this mundane world. His charwomen, schoolmasters, shopkeepers and tramps are lively real creatures of the world.
Dickens’s humours are of two types -satiric humour and pure humour. But the satire, like the character drawing owes its force from the reality. He does his best when he writes from the child’s point of view. Children are instinctive, they have imagination, vivid sensations, and they see life as black and white. They are more romantic. Their enemies are like demons; giants and their friends are angels.
Their joys and sorrows are absolute and eternal. They do not look at life with the eye of the intellect; they are not ashamed of sentiments. The first half of the Great Expectation and David Copperfield reveal the profoundest pictures of childhood. In David Copperfield, Dickens seems not only living but life like. His world is more exaggerated but lit by brighter lights, darkened by sharper shadows. Mr. and Mrs. Murdstones are ogres in front of the little child. They are terrible to the terrified child.
Dickens looked both ways. He gazed on the roaring, tawdry and sordid Vanity Fair of the world. He absolutely tended to suspect all institutions, churches, charitable institutions, government offices, laws, reformations etc. because he felt they were trying to do something by mechanical means as he expected that the good would prevail only by spontaneous action of the individuals. Class distinctions, aristocratic systems were alien to him for these were against nature. Dickens’ philosophy underlies everything he wrote. Every one of his stories, from The Tale of Two Cities to the Christmas Carol, is an illustration of it.
In each of them, we see natural human kindness pitied against the soulless cruelty of an impersonal institution. He vehemently criticised the poor iron law in the Oliver Twist, the circumlocution office and debtor’s prison of Little Dorrit, the corrupt little legal system of the Bleak House, the caste system of the ancient regime in the Tale of the Two Cities, the laissez faire and the avarice of Ralph Nickleby and the hypocrisy of Mr. Picksniff. In almost all his works, his characters fall into two groups,-those on the side of righteousness who are humble, kindly, generous souls, controlled by no speculative principles.
The other characters are on the side of wrong. They are misers, hypocrites, selfish-the Murdstone, Uriah Heep, Fagin living on the flesh of the innocent children. Thus we witness his characters are more than individual creations. All his characters are symbolic figures. They are more or less like old Morality Plays. And with the convention of the moralities his novels have universal application.
The great novelist is going to live fresh in the minds of the human beings as long as this world of ours is going to live. This shows the lofty literary values of his great works, which transcends the boundary of Europe. Thus lives our great Victorian writer. He always took sympathy on the seamy side of life. His humours and pity are not to be differentiated; laughter and tears lie closely together in his writings.
For his acute sensibility he has no peer. His imagination plays round his subjects whether it is London Street or street urchin, a middle aged lady of short temper like, Betsy Trotwood, a humbug, a coach ride -all these are his lyrical and integral parts of his subjects. His fun and pathos are inter-mingled. In fact, it is also true for all of us and our lives. Hence is his importance in the history of English literature. Original Authors: P.C. Ray
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 23/07/2008
