| |
Charles Dickens lived during a time of
great social change in Europe. Having published novels during
the late 19th century, the subject of his writing typically focused on class structure, poverty, and
treatment of the especially underprivileged. Dickens was particularly interested
in the years immediately preceding...and leading up to his
own adulthood. Between the 1770s and the 1840s, England
underwent a sweeping transformation from a sleepy agrarian
society to an intensely industrial one. For the first time, the
English merchant was able to acquire wealth and power, the likes
of which had previously only been available to the noble.
However, the flip side of this situation was that England
acquired a new class of poor people -- ones that were even
poorer than their predecessors. The fate of the new poor is
described unflinchingly in Charles Dickens’ shortest novel, Hard
Times.
In similar theme comes the novel "Great
Expectations" which is both an absorbing mystery as
well as a morality tale. It centers around the story of
"Pip" (Philip Pirrip), a poor village boy, and his
expectations of wealth. First published serially in 1860-61, it
was released as a book in 1861. "Great Expectations"
was certainly one of its author's greatest critical and popular
successes. The story is told as a first person narrative with
Pip explaining his life and times. Raised by his unpleasant
older sister and her husband, the first evidence of friendship
in the book is the relationship between Pip and his
brother-in-law, Joe Gargery. However, the reader learns in
Chapter Two how Pip views their relationship: "Has she been
gone long, Joe?' I always treated him as a larger species of
child, and as no more than my equal."
Dickens' depictions of poverty were often quite
profound. Indeed, every society has had its poor, and the poor
never live as well as the rich. But there is a difference
between, say, a teenaged girl like A Christmas Carol’s
Martha Cratchit who worked as a maidservant for a wealthier
family, and the grimly hardscrabble existence of Dickens' Oliver Twist.
Oliver was literally worked to the bone, and he was literally
starved -- deliberately so. Dickens, always ready to serve as
commentator, observes that "I wish some well-fed
philosopher, whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have
seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands the dog had
neglected. I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity
with which Oliver tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of
famine" (Twist 53).
What is remarkable about Dickens’ portrayal of
Oliver (one of literature's most famous orphans), however, is
not the inhumanity with which nineteenth-century society treated
its poor, but the complexity of the relationships of the people
trapped within its system. Dickens never allows his characters
to be mere cardboard representations of moral attributes, but
paints them as fully-fleshed individuals reacting, for better or
worse, to the conflicting demands of society and
conscience.
What can we learn from Dickens? The most enduring
legacy of the Industrial Revolution -- a legacy just as
tenacious in our own day as it was in Dickens’-- is the
complacent belief that the poor are completely responsible for
their own situation, and that if they had any spunk, ambition,
or brains, they would be able to pull themselves up by their
bootstraps and get out of this mess. This is, obviously, a
middle class perception unshared by anyone who has ever been
poor. In our day, just as in Dickens’, the violent cleavage
between classes renders the poor almost subhuman in society’s
eyes. Dickens did a tremendous job of combating this smug
assumption in Hard Times, but we need to reinforce
messages such as his with compassion toward those less fortunate
than ourselves...
CLICK HERE for a list
of essays covering ALL subjects pertaining to the life &
works of Charles Dickens!!! No topic is too difficult!!! If
we don't already have it, we'll write it
by ANY date YOU require!!!!
|
|
