Charles Dickens's Social Critique and the Tragic Vision of Later Novels

Charles Dickens: Life, Legacy, and Social Criticism (1812–1870)

His American tour was highly successful. Dickens was the first editor of the Daily News.

The Master of Sentiment and Social Reform

To his contemporaries, he was the master of sentiment. But his popularity arose from his denunciation of specific ills that everybody hated and his advocacy of improvements that everybody supported. Even the most devastating attacks by Dickens upon contemporary society are primarily aimed not against bourgeois ideals but against the failure of men to live up to those ideals.

His success sprang too from the romantic treatment of characters within realistic settings.

The Pillars of Dickens's Continuing Stature

His continuing stature rests upon:

• Fantastic fertility in character creation
• The depiction of childhood and youth
• Robust comic creation
• Unconscious artistry

Dickens's Later Novels: Structural Unity and Maturity

These products of Dickens's novelistic maturity consistently demonstrate a structural unity missing in the early novels; possibly the influence of Wilkie Collins can be seen in this.

Evolving Social Criticism and Tragic Vision

Dickens's social criticism moves from specific cases to the indictment of an entire society and of general defects in human character. Dickens, with the passing years, progressively intensified his hostility to current society.

The robust energy and fertility of Dickensian creation are now somewhat modified by a sombre realization of the complex interweavings of individual greed with the terrifying forces of modern civilization. Dickens's comic view of life moves toward a tragic vision.

Hard Times: An Attack on Industrialization

The bourgeois reading public has never relished Hard Times, for it is the first Dickens novel that really hurts. Earlier sallies could be dismissed, as Dickens's dislike of lawyers, parasites, aristocracy, and hypocrites, but this novel is frankly a tract attacking the entire system of industrialization and industrialists.

The caricatures of Hard Times are not, as in earlier Dickens novels, quaint and amusing depictions of imaginary eccentrics but caricatures of the well-to-do reader himself or, to poorer readers, of the manipulators of the system under which they lived.

The Industrial Revolution Defined

The Industrial Revolution is the name generally given to the radical changes in the methods of making goods, particularly by the factory system.