Charles Dickens Overview

Dickens saw London with dirty eyes. Colored by the Industrial Revolution's residual grime, his vision was thick with haze and factory smoke. He portrayed London's hovels, its drinking dens and shipyards, lodging houses and debtors' prisons, with hard-won insight. The author crept through London's narrow streets by day and by night, discerning the habits and characteristics of its merchants and workers. While telling the tales of individual lives, he simultaneously told of the struggles and permutations of an entire city. Indeed, the true protagonist of the Dickens novel is London; his writing is a cartography of its industrial development and social machinations. Gushing with Romantic concern for individuals in a time when industry threatened to reduce them to cogs in a machine, Dickens' novels betray a longing for societal redemption. He was a critical moralist: he saw all around him omens of an insipid transformation. The deterioration of England's educational system, the horrors of its prisons, the burgeoning poverty, the cruelties of the class system -- these were Dickens' subjects. "Dombey and Son" (1848) depicts the changes wrought by the new railway system; "Bleak House" (1853) details the life of London's growing slums; "Hard Times" (1854) treats the plight of workers in a northern mill town. In each of these works, Dickens brings his critical eye to bear on the problems he saw emerging from the proliferation of industry. But this is not to say that Dickens was a dark writer -- in fact, his ability to sentimentalize his tough subjects is legendary. Seeking, as he said, to portray the "romantic side of familiar things," Dickens strung his works with flowery sentences, exuding a sweetness that only the moral high road can bring. He expressed pathos and compassion for the oppressed people whose lives he detailed, almost to an idealistic degree. His heroines are always angelic in their moments of tragedy, his heroes able to do the noble thing in the end. Dickens, it turns out, remained an optimist despite the grime. His critical eye didn't simply condemn the state of affairs in England -- it opened up a vision of hope. Isn't this, after all, the central theme of "Great Expectations"? While an oppressive miasma hovered over London, Dickens managed to hold to the possibility of redemption.