Charles Dickens as a Novelist
Name: Rinkal jani
Roll no: 22
Year: 2016 – 2018
M.A. Semester: 2
Paper no: 6 Th Victorian litrature
Email Id: rinkaljani1807@gmail.com
Assignment topic: Charles Dickens as a Novelist
Smt. S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar University.
Charles Dickens as a novelist
Introduction
The Victorian era was a period of immense social, political and religious change, but few realize that it is the period in which “the novel” truly emerged. There are many great novelist arises during this age for example: Charles Dickens , George Eliot, Thomas hardy,Charlotte Bronte, William Morris,Benjamin, and like many others. Here we are discus about a major and very prominent novelist Charles Dickens and his contribution into a history of English literature, and also have brief over view about his life and works during Victorian age.
Dickens' Early Life
Charles Dickens was the representative novelist of the Victorian age. He is the greatest novelist that England has yet produced. Dickens' Early Life
Charles Dickens' life is like something out of a Charles Dickens' novel, which is probably not a coincidence. He was born in 1812 on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, in England, and he was the second of eight children - that's a lot of children.
Things were going super well for a while (which is not like a Charles Dickens novel). The family moved into a fancy home. They had servants. He was even going to a private school. Things were great. He read a ton. He read Daniel De foe's Robinson Crusoe (things like that), Henry Fielding, and he was also really into Arabian Nights. That's where Ali Baba, Aladdin and all those stories come from.
British novelist Charles Dickens was born England. Over the course of his writing career, Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from under him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became an early launching point for his writing career.
His works:
Charles Dickens, one of the most popular, productive, and skilled English novelist was acclaimed for his rich storytelling and unforgettable characters. His moving, critical and sentimental stories are characterized by attacks on social injustices and hypocrisy, and offer an excellent insight into Victorian culture. Dickens achieved massive worldwide popularity in his lifetime and is regarded as one of the giants of English literature.
Today his works are still widely read and regularly adapted for cinema and television. Over 75 feature films have been made based on his novels.He wrote about numbers of literary genre's like novel, Novella, Shortstory,and many other.But mostly he is wrote Novel's and novel is the only reason by he has goat success in writing career.
"I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself,
and for itself."
- Charles Dickens
Novel's
- Pickwick paper
- A tale of two cities
- David copper filed
- Black house
- The Great Expectation's
- Oliver Twist
Short stories
"The Lamplighter" (1838)
"The Sewer-Dwelling Reptiles" (1841)
"A Child's Dream of a Star" (1850)
"Captain Murderer" (1850)
"To be Read at Dusk" (1852) (a ghost story)
"The Long Voyage" (1853)
Dickens as a novelist:
As a novelist, Dickens is a social Chronicler. He is found to have introduced social novels in a much broader sense.He is the writer of some great novels such as Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Bleak House in which his comic view of life, social criticism, power of story telling and use of humor have been vividly exemplified.
Pickwick Papers:
This is the first novel of Dickens. It is like the supreme comic novel in English language. His comedy is never superimposed because it is an effortless expression of a comic view of life. Dickens seems to see things differently in an amusing and exaggerated way, and in his early work with much exuberance he plunges from one adventure to another, without any thought of plot or design.
David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Hard Times,
David Copperfield is his second novel, and in these novel's he gave the contemporary social picture and attacked the various vices of the Victorian age. Dickens enjoyed life, but hated the social system into which he had been born. There are many indications that he was half-way towards being a revolutionary, and in many of the later novels he was to attack the corruptions of his time.
Oliver Twist: in which (which followed in 1837-8), pathos is beginning to intrude on humor, and Dickens, appalled by the cruelty of his time,feels that he must convey a message through fiction to his hardhearted generation. Yet some modern social historians assert that he disguised the depths to which the lower classes had been brutalized. His invention is still abundant, as he tells the story of the virtuous pauper boy who has to submit to perils and temptations. Burnaby Rudge, with its picture of the Gordon Riots, is Dickens first attempt in the historical novel, and here plot, which had counted for nothing in Pickwick Papers, becomes increasingly important.
Dickens Characters
(1) The normal
(2) The abnormal
(i) Satirical portraits
(ii) The grotesques
(iii) The villains (drawn for a special purpose)
The abnormal characters do not embody "normal" reality, but they are not essentially unrealistic. It is curious that Dickens succeeds better with the abnormal than with the normal characters. Normality does not attract him on account of being dull and "ordinary."
Dickens is more successful with characters drawn from the middle and lower classes of his society. As a child and young man he had seen and even experienced the life of these classes. It was in his blood even after he had become a high-hat with his thumping success in the field of fiction. He is much less successful with the bigwigs and aristocracy. There ate some set types which make their appearance much too often in Dickens' novels. Some of them, according to a critic, are:
(i) "the innocent little child, like Oliver, Joe, Paul, Tiny Tim, and little Nell, appealing powerfully to the child love in every human heart";
(ii) "the horrible or grotesque foil, like Queers, Fagin, Quilp, Uriah Heep, and Bill Sykes";
(iii) "the grandiloquent or broadly humorous fellow, the fun master, like Micawber and Sam Walter";
(iv) "and fourth, a tenderly or powerfully drawn figure like Lady Deadlock of Bleak House, and Sydney Carton of A Tale of Two Cities, which rise to the dignity of true characters."
Humor:
Dickens architectonic deficiency the moment we take cognizance of his humor. Humor is the very soul of his work.Dickens' humor arises from a deep human sympathy and is ever fresh and refreshing. It is customary to compare him with such great humorists before him as Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Fielding. Sometimes his humor is corrective and satiric-but it always has the quality of geniality, charity, and tolerance. Humor with him is not only an occasional mood but a consistent point of view, and even a "philosophy of life." His comic fertility is indeed amazing. We have above referred to Dickens "world."
Pathos:
“That means that the quality or property of anything which touches the feelings of excites emotions and passions, especially that awakens tender emotions, like Pity and sorrow.”
Dickens was as considerably influenced by Goldsmith and Stem as by Fielding and Smollett. Sterne's sentimentalism and rather hypersensitive human sympathy as also Goldsmith's fundamental sweetness and fellow-feeling often make themselves felt in Dickens' work. The earliest attempt made by Dickens at the delineation of the pathetic is to be found in his very first novel Pickwick Papers-the death of the Chancery prisoners. He is wonderfully successful in delineating the pathos of child life. As a child, he himself had suffered much, and his accounts of such life are always redolent of his personal experiences. Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and many more novels are rich in pathetic accounts of the lives of their heroes in childhood. What is more, pathos in them mingles and merges with humor, creating very peculiar effects.
Autobiographic Touches:
A peculiar feature of Dickens' art as novelist is his tendency to be autobiographic. He constantly draws upon his own experience, and the sympathies and antipathies which we find so persistently manifested by him in his work very often have their origin in the years of his adolescence. Many of his novels are the records of his own life-though modified by subjection to the canons of art. Thus David Copperfield is, in essentials, Dickens' autobiography. Oliver Twist uses a lot of material supplied by his own experience of the low life of London in his tender years. In Bleak House he draws substantially upon his early knowledge of law courts and legal affairs. He recollects his school days in Nicholas Nickleby. And so forth.
Dickens and social concern :
There is, however, little of this optimism in Dickens' novels. He focuses instead on the daily needs and problems of ordinary people: poverty, poor housing, ill health, a horrifying level of child mortality, hunger, long hours of grinding labour. The rapid changes of the time benefited some people long before others. Dickens is concerned with those still waiting for improvements and raises key moral and social
questions in his writing:
the need for schooling and the care of orphans and other deprived children,cruelty to children and the corruption of children by criminal the problems created by emphasis on social class and newly acquired wealth the problems created by rapid industrialization and urbanization and the conflict between employers and workers.
To wind up:
we must say that, Like all great artists he viewed the world as if it was an entirely fresh experience seen for the first time, and he had an extraordinary range of language, from comic invention to great eloquence. He invented character and situation with a range that had been unequaled since Shakespeare. So deeply did he affect his audiences that the view of life behind his novels has entered into the English tradition. Reason and theory he distrusted, but compassion and cheerfulness of heart he elevated into the supreme virtues.
Another thing is that In spite of the formidable number of flaws and limitations from which Dickens' art as a novelist suffers, he is a great novelist. His humor, basic human sympathy, and his rich, vitalizing imagination are his basic assets, even though he is deficient in the architectural skill as well as other formal and "technical" qualifications as a novelist. He may be coarse and superficial, but we must remember that he is never a bore. And when that is said, much is!
“There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”
― Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Citation:
1. http://www.literary-articles.com/2009/06/evaluate-charles-dickens-as-novelist.html
2. http://neoenglishsystem.blogspot.in/2010/12/art-of-charles-dickens-as-novelist.html
3. Wikipedia
What is the central characteristic of Dickens's as novelist?
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