Charles Dickens.

« The Old Curiosity Shop broke hearts across Britain and North America when it first appeared.

Later readers, however, have found it excessively sentimental, especially the pathos surrounding the death of its child-heroine Little Nell.

Dickens’s next two works proved less popular with the public. Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’s first historical novel, revolves around anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780.

The events in Martin Chuzzlewit become a vehicle for the novel’s theme: selfishness and its evils.

The characters, especially the Chuzzlewit family, present a multitude of perspectives on greed and unscrupulous self-interest.

Dickens wrote it after a trip to the United States in 1842. B Mature Fiction Many critics have cited Dombey and Son as the work in which Dickens’s style matures and he succeeds in bringing multiple episodes together in a tight narrative.

Set in the world of railroad-building during the 1840s, Dombey and Son looks at the social effects of the profit-driven approach to business.

The novel was immediately successful. Dickens always considered David Copperfield to be his best novel and the one he most liked.

The beginning seems to be autobiographical, with David’s childhood experiences recalling Dickens’s own in the blacking factory.

The unifying theme of the book is the “undisciplined heart” of the young David, which leads to all hismistakes, including the greatest of them, his mistaken first marriage. Bleak House ushers in Dickens’s final period as a satirist and social critic.

A court case involving an inheritance forms the mainspring of the plot, and ultimately connects all of the characters in the novel.

The dominant image in the book is fog, which envelops, entangles, veils, and obscures.

The fog stands for the law, the courts, vestedinterests, and corrupt institutions.

Dickens had a long-standing dislike of the legal system and protracted lawsuits from his days as a reporter in the courts. A novel about industry, Hard Times, followed Bleak House in 1854.

In Hard Times, Dickens satirizes the theories of political economists through exaggerated characters such as Mr.

Bounderby, the self-made man motivated by greed, and Mr.

Gradgrind, the schoolmaster who emphasizes facts and figures over all else.

In Bounderby’smines, lives are ground down; in Gradgrind’s classroom, imagination and feelings are strangled. The pervading image of Little Dorrit is the jail.

Dickens’s memory of his own father’s time in debtors’ prison adds an autobiographical touch to the novel.

Little Dorrit also contains Dickens’s invention of the Circumlocution Office, the archetype of all bureaucracies, where nothing ever gets done.

Through this critique and others, suchas the circular legal system in Bleak House , Dickens also investigated the ways in which art makes meaning and the workings of his own narrative style. A Tale of Two Cities is set in London and Paris during the French Revolution (1789-1799).

It stands out among the novels as a work driven by incident and event rather than by character and is critical both of the violence of the mob and of the abuses of the aristocracy, which prompted the revolution.

The successful Tale of Two Cities was soon followed by Great Expectations , which marked a return to the more familiar Dickensian style of character-driven narrative.

Its main character, Pip, tells his own story.

Pip’s “great expectations” are to lead an idle life of luxury.

Through Pip, Dickens exposes that ideal as false. Dickens’s last complete novel is the dark and powerful Our Mutual Friend. A tale of greed and obsession, it takes place in an ill-lit and dirty London, with images of darkness and decay throughout.

Only 6 of the 12 intended parts of Edwin Drood had been completed by the time Dickens died.

He intended it as a mystery story concerning the disappearance of the title character. IV FINAL YEARS The end of Dickens’s life was emotionally scarred by his separation from his dutiful wife, Catherine, as the result of his involvement with a young actress, Ellen Ternan.Catherine bore him ten children during their 22-year marriage, but he found her increasingly dull and unsympathetic.

Against the advice of editors, Dickens published aletter vehemently justifying his actions to his readers, who would otherwise have known nothing about them. Following the separation, Dickens continued his hectic schedule of novel, story, essay, and letter writing (his collected letters alone stretch thousands of pages); reformactivities; amateur theatricals and readings; in addition to nightly social engagements and long midnight walks through London.

His energy had always seemed to hisfriends inhuman, but he maintained this activity in his later years in disregard of failing health.

Dickens died of a stroke shortly after his farewell reading tour, whilewriting The Mystery of Edwin Drood . V ACHIEVEMENT Dickens’s social critique in his novels was sharp and pointed.

As his biographer Edgar Johnson observed in Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), Dickens’s criticism was aimed not just at “the cruelty of the workhouse and the foundling asylum, the enslavement of human beings in mines and factories, the hideous evil ofslums where crime simmered and proliferated, the injustices of the law, and the cynical corruption of the lawmakers” but also at “the great evil permeating every field ofhuman endeavor: the entire structure of exploitation on which the social order was founded.” British writer George Orwell felt that Dickens was not a revolutionary, however, despite his criticism of society’s ills.

Orwell points out that Dickens “has no constructivesuggestions, not even a clear grasp of the nature of the society he is attacking, only an emotional perception that something is wrong.” That instinctive feeling becomesso moving in the novels because Dickens made the injustices he hated concrete and specific, not abstract and general.

His readers feel the abuses of 19th-centurysociety as real through the life of his characters.

Underlying and reinforcing that illusion of reality, however, is a rich and complicated system of symbolic imageryresulting from superb artistry. Through his characters, Dickens also touched a range of readers, which was perhaps his greatest talent.

As his friend John Forster wrote, his stories enthralled “judgeson the bench and boys in the street” alike.

The illiterate, often too poor to buy installments themselves, pooled their pennies and got someone to read aloud to them. Near the end of the serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop , crowds thronged to a New York pier to await the ship from London carrying the latest installment.

As it came to the dock people roared, “Is Little Nell dead?” The pathetic death of the novel’s child-heroine, Nell Trent, became one of the most celebrated scenes in 19th-centuryfiction.

Such public concern over Little Nell’s end guaranteed that Dickens’s social message would be heard, not only by his avid readers, but also by those in power. Dickens was a careful craftsman, with a strong sense of design; his books were strictly outlined.

Any current notions that Dickens’s novels are long because he was paidby the word, or sloppy because he wrote them under pressure of monthly deadlines, are simply untrue.

What organizes Dickens’s stories is sometimes not apparent atfirst glance, although it makes sense in novels that emphasize character.

It is the logic of psychology, the tensions and contradictions of our drives and emotions, whichDickens plumbed, laying side by side the best and the worst of the human heart.

This is a very different logic from the order of realism that rests on common sense.Dickens detested common sense, seeing in its seeming obviousness a form of tyranny. The theater was a crucial influence on Dickens’s work.

As a young man Dickens tried to go on stage, but he missed his audition because of a cold.

Not only did Dickenslater write comic plays, melodramas, and libretti (words for musical dramas), he was also often involved in amateur theatricals for good causes, and spent his last two. »