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

Creative Imagination of Charles Dickens

David Cecil remarks: “Creative imagination may not be the only quality necessary to the novelist, but it is the first quality. And no English novelist had it quite in the way Dickens had. Scott’s imagination and Emily Bronte’s were of a finer quality. Jane Austen’s was more exactly articulated, but none of them had an imagination as one so forceful, so varied, and so self-dependent as Dickens’s. Indeed, his best passages have an immediate, irresistible music. Unassisted by substitute or intellectual interest he sweeps away, as Wager does, by sheer dramatic intensity. That is why, his popularity has not declined”.
Dickens’s world is not lifelike, but it is extraordinarily alive. This is so because he was exceptionally gifted with creative imagination. A street in London as described by Dickens is certainly a street in London, yet it is different too. “For Dickens has used the real world to create his own world, to add a country to the geography of the imagination”. As Hugh Walker avers: “He is the romancer of London life, and his romances, are founded on reality”.
Dickens’s creative imagination is also seen in inventing dramatic and picturesque incidents. Many such dramatic incidents readily come to the mind of all readers of Dickens. Again, his creative imagination makes them excel in humor. Humour is, by its very nature, creative. It is not a mere record of fact but a comment on them; it makes something new of them. “All the great Victorian novelists are humorists, and each is a humorist in a style of his own.” Dickens has created countless comic figures. Mr. Micawber, uncle Pumblechook and others, are all comic, each in his own way. Finally, his creative imagination is reflected in the fact that his characters are extremely alive. His characters are real, living, breathing human beings. His characters are so vital and lifelike that they linger in the
memory even when the actual incidents of the novel have been forgotten. His characters are immortal personages due to his rich creative imagination.