From Hard Timesto Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens used his pen to help illuminate the lives of the less fortunate
WORDS: NIGE TASSELL
On Charles Dickens’s death in 1870, an epitaph circulated around London declaring the late novelist to be “a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering and the oppressed”. Such a tribute was not without reason. His works remain synonymous with the lower end of Victorian society, a landscape inhabited by orphans, factory workers, prostitutes and those fallen on hard times. Dickens gave them a voice, gave them dignity.
And that legacy prevailed.
Several decades later, the critic GK Chesterton labelled Dickens “the spokesman of the poor”. Many believed his novels had partially reset the political and social agenda.
CLASS CRITICISM
Not everyone, though. George Orwell was among the sharpest critics when it came to Dickens’s actual dedication to social reform. Orwell observed that most of the action in the novels takes place in middle-class settings that feature “the London commercial bourgeoisie and their hangers-on”. The truly poor, claimed Orwell, were neglected by the novelist. “He has no portrait of an agricultural worker, and only one (Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times) of an industrial worker.” Writing in the 1930s, Orwell contended that “if you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sikes, Sam Weller and Mrs Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife – not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.”
Orwell went further, decrying Dickens for not being a sufficiently revolutionary writer. Despite his popular image as a champion of the poor, he didn’t call for the restructuring of society to create a more equitable climate. “In reality, his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’,” Orwell argued. “His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently, the world would be decent.”
Despite the absence of the attributes and determinations listed by Orwell, Dickens was immensely popular with the poor, even the illiterate members of society who would pay to have the new instalment of his latest work read to them. By locating a fair proportion of his
