Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812. As the second of eight children in a very poor family, he lived a difficult childhood. Eventually, his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and Dickens himself went to work at the age of twelve to help pay off the family’s debt.

This troublesome time scarred Dickens deeply and left an ineradicable impression on his mind. Besides, this first-hand taste of misery provided him with substantial material for such stories as Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield, in which filthy working conditions appeat repeatedly. A Time of Change

The Industrial Revolution, which swept through Europe in the late eighteenth century, originated in England. The rapid modernization of the English economy involved a shift from rural handicraft to large-scale factory labor. English cities swelled as a growing and impoverished working class flocked to them in search of work. As this influx of workers into urban centers continued, the bourgeoisie took advantage of the surplus of labor by keeping wages low. The poor thus remained poor, and often lived cramped in sordid squalor. In many of his novels, Dickens chronicles his protagonists’ attempts to fight their way out of such poverty and despair.

Steeped in social criticism, Dickens’s writing provides a keen, sympathetic chronicle of the plight of the urban poor in nineteenth-century England.

During his lifetime, Dickens enjoyed immense popularity, in part because of his vivid characterizations, and in part because he published his novels in installments, making them readily affordable to a greater number of people. one the greatest critical realist

dehumanizing workhouse & slums Oliver Twist enslaving school Nicholas Nickleby

legal fraud The Pickwick Paper debtor's prison David Copperfield a large-scale criticism

corrupting money-worship Dombey and Son greed and lust The Old Curiosity Shop abuses of the courts Bleak House economic exploitation Hard Times

childern as central figures David Copperfield Oliver Twist Great Expectations The Old Curiostiy Shop a master of humor and pathos

Dickens believed that life is delightful because it is at once comic and tragic. In his early works, there are constant jokes and laughter; yet he explores a more and more \world\as his attacks become more urgent and passionate. strength and weakness

It is Dickens' serious intention to expose and criticize all the poverty, injustice, hypocrisy adn corruptness he sees all around him. sometimes Dickens seems so anxious to wring an extra tear from the audience that he indulges in excessive sentimental melodrama. Oliver Twist

As the child hero of a melodramatic novel of social protest, Oliver Twist is meant to appeal more to our sentiments than to our literary sensibilities. On many levels, Oliver is not a believable character, because although he is raised in corrupt surroundings, his purity and virtue are absolute.

Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of vice. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates pick a stranger’s pocket and again when he is forced to participate in a burglary. Even when he is abused and manipulated, Oliver does not become angry or indignant. When Sikes and Crackit force him to assist in a robbery, Oliver merely begs to be allowed to “run away and die in the fields.”Oliver does not present a complex picture of a person torn between good and evil—instead, he is goodness incarnate. Purity in a Corrupt City

Throughout the novel, Dickens confronts the question of whether the terrible environments he depicts have the power to “blacken the soul and change its hue for ever.” By examin-ing the fates of most of the characters, we can assume that his answer is that they do not. Certainly, characters like Sikes and Fagin seem to have sustained permanent damage to their moral sensibilities. Yet even Sikes has a conscience, which manifests itself in the apparition of Nancy’s eyes that haunts him after he murders her. Of course, Oliver is above any corruption, though the novel removes him from unhealthy environments relatively early in his life.

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