Course paper on the theme “Ways to create a gallery of children's imagines in the novels of Charlis Dickens”

Variety and Range of Dickens’s Novels

Dickens never lost his sympathy for the poor and the mistreated. His best novels are of victims of the slums, the poor houses, the debtors’ prisons, and of the seamy sides of London life. The novels of Dickens are filled with stark realism and with a kindly humor. He never became bitter or bitingly satirical, but even when dealing with the most miserable of social conditions, his tone is one of idealism and his situations are sketched with understanding and sympathetic feelings. He was a novelist of the people and his creations have had a continuous popularity with all classes of people to the present day. Dickens did his best in the novels to call public attention to slum conditions and the miseries of the lower strata of the English society. He did not approve the industrial system and propagandized endlessly for the abolition of the evils in the legal system, the workhouses and the debtors’ prisons, and the miserable conditions in the factory system. In most of his novels he was a social writer who never lost his faith in the basic goodness of human character. He was a reformer, a humanitarian, and a mild romantic.
Dickens was a good reporter and many of his novels read as though the events recounted had happened last night and are now before the reader’s eyes in the early morning edition. Dickens is known best for his humor and the many unforgettable characters he created. His characters range throughout the English society, criminals, little children, misers, pickpockets, lawyers, gentlemen, servants, gossipers, etc. In these creations he the author’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness. Too often his fictional personages seem caricatures and show exaggerated traits of the cartoon. Dickens had a keen theatrical sense and often his incidents descend to mere melodrama. Dickens was close to the picaresque fiction of Smollett and of the great Spanish development of an earlier day in much of his work. But he was an ideal Victorian blend of the romantic and the realistic. His reportorial experience gets reflected in many of his novels. He often has more than one novel running concurrently in newspapers and magazines and these show the broken plot effects of the serial method of writing.⁴