To browse Academia. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Charles Dickens as a social reformer. Anida Catic. A short summary of this paper.
Download PDF. Translate PDF. The novels of Dickens belong entirely to the humanitarian movement of the Victorian Age, of which they are indeed, in the sphere of fiction, by far the most important product and expression. Dickens reserved some of his most scathing attacks for capitalists who put profits over people.
By the s, northern England had become home to a new, industrial landscape. Factories dominated the skylines of towns that were rapidly expanding with the influx of new workers.
Long hours, dangerous working conditions and the unregulated employment of women and children created anxiety among social elites. In , Dickens signalled his support for legislation restricting the labour of women and adolescents to 10 hours a day. One of his next novels, The Old Curiosity Shop serialised from , included a frightening account of an industrial town through which Nell and her grandfather were forced to travel.
Seduced by scenes of well-dressed and prosperous female factory workers, who had pianos in their boarding houses and subscriptions to a circulating library, he praised the factories he encountered in Lowell, Massachusetts in his American Notes.
Subsequent public speeches also expressed pride in the achievements and potential of British industry. For the local businessman Mr Gradgrind, there is nothing of value in life but facts and figures. Dickens also expressed little sympathy for the striking workers — like other middle-class writers, he feared their revolutionary potential.
They did not, he suggested, need better wages, but more fulsome lives. They needed, in other words, to have some fun. The author vigorously opposed the new social elite that turned up its nose at traditional, working-class entertainments. Dickens revealed his tremendous love of entertainment in his first popular serial, Sketches by Boz, which contained vignettes of the various amusements available in London for those in search of fun.
But Dickens was living through an age of significant change in the leisure world, occasioned by the shift from an agrarian to an urban and indus- trial society. In , Dickens attacked the Sabbatarian movement — which aimed to dramatically restrict the availability of leisure on Sundays to enforce religious observance — with his pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads. Four years later, The Old Curiosity Shop captured the plight of itinerant showmen — Punch and Judy men, stilt walkers, conjurors, freaks and waxworks proprietors — who, with precarious incomes and under the threat of suppression, were fighting for survival.
Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht. Amusement provided an outlet for the imagination, the suppression of which would be destructive to humanity. Quality mattered too. As old forms of entertainment declined, new ones emerged to fill the gap, but Dickens was critical of their content.
Sign in. Leaning on his own terrible experience as a labourer child, he fiercely attacked the administration, and expressed his deep repugnance through the characters of his fiction, as reflected by Oliver Twist, and the abuse and exploitation that he suffered as a child.
In addition to his novels, which he used to fuel social change, Dickens was actively VIII involved in charities which funded schools for the poor and reformation institutions for the prostitutes.
The research ultimately concludes with the proclamation that Dickens was not a mere fiction writer. His works were intended to serve the social causes of bringing about reform, and raising people's awareness of the untoward Victorian social conditions and urge the authorities to take measures to improve the situation.
This is conveyed through Dickens' powerful depiction of the prevailing conditions. Description: Thesis. Name: Charles Dickens Size:
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