1 INTRODUCTION
2 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN GREAT BRITAIN: ITS INFLUENCE AS A MODEL OF HISTORIC TRANSFORMATION
2.1 Origins of the Industrial Revolution
2.2 Modernisation of industry
2.3 Improvement of transportation
3 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES THROUGH LITERATURE
3.1 Social changes
3.2 Geographic movements
3.3 Political changes
3.4 Literature of the period
4 CHARLES DICKENS
4.1 Biography and works
4.2 Characteristics of Dickens´s works
4.3 Dickens on screen
5 STUDY GUIDE
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 INTRODUCTION
The term Industrial Revolution is commonly used to denote the changes in the organisation of production that mark the passage from a rural handicraft barter economy to an urban industrial wage-earning economy. Although many countries have undergone this change in different ways and at different times, the term refers specifically to the first historical instance of this change: the British industrialisation. This term was first popularised in the late 19th century by the economic historian Arnold Toynbee to describe England’s economic development from 1760 to 1840. However, to think that Britain suddenly became an industrialised country towards the end of the 18th century would not be correct, since this happened over a long period which started already in the 17th century. As far as its extension is concerned, it reached its peak towards the mid 19th century, around the time of the Crystal Palace Exhibition that was held in London in 1851 in which the pride of the British industry was exhibited to the world, and it started to decline in the late Victorian period.
The onset of the Industrial Revolution marked a major turning point in human social history, comparable to the invention of farming or the rise of the first city-states; almost every aspect of daily life and human society was eventually influenced in some way.
In the later part of the 1700s the manual labour based economy of the Kingdom of Great Britain began to be replaced by one dominated by industry and the manufacture of machinery. It started with the mechanisation of the textile industries, the development of iron-making techniques and the increased use of refined coal. Once started it spread. Trade expansion was enabled by the introduction of canals, improved roads and railways. The introduction of steam power (fuelled primarily by coal) and powered machinery (mainly in textile manufacturing) underpinned the dramatic increases in production capacity. The development of all-metal machine tools in the first two decades of the 19th century facilitated the manufacture of more production machines for manufacturing in other industries. The effects spread throughout Western Europe and North America during the 19th century, eventually affecting most of the world. The impact of this change on society was enormous.
However there was a dark side of this epoch of wealth and prosperity. The Industrial Revolution led to a population increase, but the chance of surviving childhood didn’t improve throughout the industrial revolution. There was still limited opportunity for education, and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less than an adult even though their productivity was comparable; there was no need for strength to operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new there were no experienced adult labourers. This made child labour the labour of choice for manufacturing in the early phases of the industrial revolution between the 18th and 19th centuries. This was one of the ugliest faces of an age of development and richness, a fact denounced by Dickens in some of his works.
Such a productive era raised the talent of many writes who portrayed the changes of the new society in their works. One of the most important writers was Charles Dickens who still catches the attention of criticism and readership.
In the first part of our topic, we will study the influence of the industrial revolution as a model of historic transformation, detailing the origins of the process, industrial consequences and social changes. Then, in the second part of our study we shall analyze the life and works of Charles Dickens.
2 THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION IN GREAT BRITAIN: ITS INFLUENCE AS A MODEL OF HISTORIC TRANSFORMATION
2.1 Origins of the Industrial Revolution
The reasons for Britain to become the first country which developed a modern industry were partly material and partly social and political.
The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Great Britain had over other countries. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out, however, that slavery provided only 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution. Alternatively, the greater liberalization of trade from a large merchant base may have allowed Britain to produce and use emerging scientific and technological developments more effectively than countries with stronger monarchies, particularly China and Russia. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and economic collapse, and possessing the only merchant fleet of any useful size (European merchant fleets having been destroyed during the war by the Royal Navy). Britain was favoured in the first place by the fact that it was a small island, so that most of the land was within easy reach of water transport. Because of that England had developed a large merchant and war fleet. The British military supremacy brought about an expansion of colonial commerce, that provided abundant raw materials and new markets in which to sell English manufactured products. At the same time, English laws prevented the creation of industry in the colonies.
Britain’s extensive exporting cottage industries also ensured markets were already available for many early forms of manufactured goods. The conflict resulted in most British warfare being conducted overseas, reducing the devastating effects of territorial conquest that affected much of Europe. This was further aided by Britain’s geographical position — an island separated from the rest of mainland Europe.
Another theory is that Britain was able to succeed in the Industrial Revolution due to the availability of key resources it possessed. It had a dense population for its small geographical size. Enclosure of common land and the related Agricultural Revolution made a supply of this labour readily available. There was also a local coincidence of natural resources in the North of England, the English Midlands, South Wales and the Scottish Lowlands. Local supplies of coal, iron, lead, copper, tin, limestone and water power, resulted in excellent conditions for the development and expansion of industry. Also, the damp, mild weather conditions of the North West of England provided ideal conditions for the spinning of cotton, providing a natural starting point for the birth of the textiles industry.
The stable political situation in Britain from around 1688, and British society’s greater receptiveness to change (compared with other European countries) can also be said to be factors favouring the Industrial Revolution. In large part due to the Enclosure movement, the peasantry was destroyed as significant source of resistance to industrialization, and the landed upper classes developed commercial interests that made them pioneers in removing obstacles to the growth of capitalism.
Another theory is that the British advance was due to the presence of an entrepreneurial class which believed in progress, technology and hard work. The existence of this class is often linked to the Protestant work ethic and the particular status of the Baptists and the dissenting Protestant sects, such as the Quakers and Presbyterians that had flourished with the English Civil War. Reinforcement of confidence in the rule of law, which followed establishment of the prototype of constitutional monarchy in Britain in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the emergence of a stable financial market there based on the management of the national debt by the Bank of England, contributed to the capacity for, and interest in, private financial investment in industrial ventures.
Furthermore, since the beginning of the 18th century England had also gone through a transformation of agriculture. The Enclosure Act consolidated the land in the hands of great landlords and farming as a form of capitalist enterprise was introduced. With the introduction of new inventions and discoveries many people were forced off the land into the cities and at the same time production was increased to feed the new urban society.
The long tradition of commerce had favoured the rise of capitalism, that is, there was an important accumulation of capital that could be invested in the new industry. Moreover, Britain was also rich in the natural resources that the new technology required, especially water, coal and iron.
Finally, the Industrial Revolution was possible due to the technological developments such as the steam engine and the new machines, which enabled the shift from muscle to steam power.
2.2 Modernisation of industry
This development was specially significant in the iron and coal industry and in the textile industry.
In the early 18th century, British textile manufacture was based on wool which was processed by individual artisans, doing the spinning and weaving on their own premises. This system is called a cottage industry. Flax and cotton were also used for fine materials, but the processing was difficult because of the pre-processing needed, and thus goods in these materials made only a small proportion of the output.
Use of the spinning wheel and hand loom restricted the production capacity of the industry, but incremental advances increased productivity to the extent that manufactured cotton goods became the dominant British export by the early decades of the 19th century. India was displaced as the premier supplier of cotton goods.
Other inventors increased the efficiency of the individual steps of spinning (carding, twisting and spinning, and rolling) so that the supply of yarn increased greatly, which fed a weaving industry that was advancing with improvements to shuttles and the loom or ‘frame’. The output of an individual labourer increased dramatically, with the effect that the new machines were seen as a threat to employment, and early innovators were attacked and their inventions destroyed.
With regards the metal industries the major change during the era of the Industrial Revolution was the replacement of organic fuels based on wood with fossil fuel based on coal. Much of this happened somewhat before the Industrial Revolution, based on innovations by Sir Clement Clerke and others from 1678, using coal reverberatory furnaces known as cupolas.
Up to that time, British iron manufacturers had used considerable amounts of imported iron to supplement native supplies. This came principally from Sweden from the mid 17th century and later also from Russia from the end of the 1720s. However, from 1785, imports decreased because of the new iron making technology, and Britain became an exporter of bar iron as well as manufactured wrought iron consumer goods.
Since iron was becoming cheaper and more plentiful, it also became a major structural material following the building of the innovative Iron Bridge in 1778 by Abraham Darby III.
An improvement was made in the production of steel, which was an expensive commodity and used only where iron would not do, such as for the cutting edge of tools and for springs. Benjamin Huntsman developed his crucible steel technique in the 1740s. The raw material for this was blister steel, made by the cementation process.
Coal mining in Britain, particularly in South Wales started early. Before the steam engine, pits were often shallow bell pits following a seam of coal along the surface which were abandoned as the coal was extracted.
2.3 Improvement of transportation
At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, inland transport was by navigable rivers and roads, with coastal vessels employed to move heavy goods by sea. Railways or wagon ways were used for conveying coal to rivers for further shipment, but canals had not yet been constructed. Animals supplied all of the motive power on land, with sails providing the motive power on the sea.
The Industrial Revolution improved Britain’s transport infrastructure with a turnpike road network, a canal, and waterway network, and a railway network. Raw materials and finished products could be moved more quickly and cheaply than before. Improved transportation also allowed new ideas to spread quickly.
Sailing vessels had long been used for moving goods round the British coast. The trade transporting coal to London from Newcastle had begun in mediaeval times. The major international seaports such as London, Bristol, and Liverpool, were the means by which raw materials such as cotton might be imported and finished goods exported. Transporting goods onwards within Britain by sea was common during the whole of the Industrial Revolution and only fell away with the growth of the railways at the end of the period.
All the major rivers of the United Kingdom were navigable during the Industrial Revolution. Some were anciently navigable, notably the Severn, Thames, and Trent. Some were improved, or had navigation extended upstream, but usually in the period before the Industrial Revolution, rather than during it.
The Severn, in particular, was used for the movement of goods to the Midlands which had been imported into Bristol from abroad, and for the export of goods from centres of production in Shropshire (such as iron goods from Coalbrookdale) and the Black Country. Transport was by way of trows—small sailing vessels which could pass the various shallows and bridges in the river. The trows could navigate the Bristol Channel to the South Wales ports and Somerset ports, such as Bridgwater and even as far as France.
Canals began to be built in the late eighteenth century to link the major manufacturing centres in the Midlands and north with seaports and with London, at that time itself the largest manufacturing centre in the country. Canals were the first technology to allow bulk materials to be easily transported across country. A single canal horse could pull a load dozens of times larger than a cart at a faster pace. By the 1820s, a national network was in existence. Canal construction served as a model for the organisation and methods later used to construct the railways. They were eventually largely superseded as profitable commercial enterprises by the spread of the railways from the 1840s on.
Britain’s canal network, together with its surviving mill buildings, is one of the most enduring features of the early Industrial Revolution to be seen in Britain.
Much of the original British road system was poorly maintained by thousands of local parishes, but from the 1720s (and occasionally earlier) turnpike trusts were set up to charge tolls and maintain some roads. Increasing numbers of main roads were turnpiked from the 1750s to the extent that almost every main road in England and Wales was the responsibility of some turnpike trust. New engineered roads were built by John Metcalf, Thomas Telford and John Macadam. The major turnpikes radiated from London and were the means by which the Royal Mail was able to reach the rest of the country. Heavy goods transport on these roads was by means of slow, broad wheeled, carts hauled by teams of horses. Lighter goods were conveyed by smaller carts or by teams of pack horse. Stage coaches carried the rich, and the less wealthy could pay to ride on carriers carts.
Wagon ways for moving coal in the mining areas had started in the 17th century and were often associated with canal or river systems for the further movement of coal. These were all horse drawn or relied on gravity, with a stationary steam engine to haul the wagons back to the top of the incline. The first applications of the steam locomotive were on wagon or plate ways (as they were then often called from the cast iron plates used). Horse-drawn public railways did not begin until the early years of the 19th century. Steam-hauled public railways began with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830. The construction of major railways connecting the larger cities and towns began in the 1830s but only gained momentum at the very end of the first Industrial Revolution.
After many of the workers had completed the railways, they did not return to their rural lifestyles but instead remained in the cities, providing additional workers for the factories.
Railways helped Britain’s trade enormously, providing a quick and easy way of transport.
3 SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CHANGES THROUGH LITERATURE
3.1 Social changes
The changes that took place in economy were reflected in a change in the social organisation. Pre-industrial society was constituted by closed groups predestined by birth, industrial society, on the other hand, is a class-society formed by groups determined by money. The new society was constituted by an upper class of aristocrats, industrialists and merchants and a working class.
Ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of labour dominated by a pace set by machines. However, harsh working conditions were prevalent long before the industrial revolution took place as well. Pre-industrial society was very static and often cruel—child labour, dirty living conditions and long working hours were just as prevalent before the Industrial Revolution. Since the power was in the hands of the industrialists, laws favoured them and the conditions of the workers deteriorated. Craftsmen disappeared as a result of industry competition and the increase of production lead to a decrease of salaries. The exploitation of workers and the use of women and children as cheap labour was common. The working class was very different from the previous lower class of farmers and craftsmen.
Firstly, they did not own the means of production, they rather had to work for a wage. Furthermore, there was a high division of labour, so that the workers specialised in doing a job in which they often were mere appendices of machines. Finally, they felt alienated, having to work and live under horrendous conditions in the new industrial cities.
The Industrial Revolution led to a population increase, but the chance of surviving childhood didn’t improve throughout the industrial revolution. There was still limited opportunity for education, and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less than an adult even though their productivity was comparable; there was no need for strength to operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new there were no experienced adult labourers.
Child labour had existed before the Industrial Revolution, but with the increase in population and education it became more visible. Before the passing of laws protecting children, many were forced to work in terrible conditions for much lower pay than their elders.
In any peasant community children work in the fields. As families move in from the countryside to work in Britain’s developing industrial cities, there is nothing intrinsically strange about children joining their parents in the factories. And the entrepreneurs who own the factories welcome a supply of labour trapped by economic circumstances into accepting long hours and low pay.
The living conditions of the poor in any rapidly growing city, without sanitation, are invariably worse than the condition of peasants in the countryside. But in Britain in the early 19th century it is exploitation within the factories which prompts the first measures of reform. The first Factory Act, in 1802, introduces a regulation which by later standards seems astonishing. It limits the amount of time which a child may work in a factory to twelve hours a day.
After much opposition the reformers achieve significant improvements in the Factory Act of 1833. Children under nine are now not to work at all. Those aged between nine and thirteen are limited to eight hours of work and must be given two hours of education each day (this is the first small step towards compulsory education in Britain). And an inspectorate is set up for the factories, albeit initially with only four inspectors for the entire country. The last significant regulation of hours of work is achieved in the Ten Hour Act of 1847, which stipulates that number of hours as the maximum working day for women and children in the nation’s factories and textile mills. This act is largely the achievement of Lord Shaftesbury, who is responsible also for the Mines Act of 1842. This makes it illegal for women of any age and for boys under thirteen to be employed underground. By the mid-century Shaftesbury is much concerned with the condition of London slums, campaigning actively for improvements in housing and public sanitation.
Poor people lived in very small houses in cramped streets. These homes would share toilet facilities, have open sewers and would be at risk of damp. Disease was spread through a contaminated water supply. Conditions did improve during the 19th century as public health acts were introduced covering things such as sewage, hygiene and making some boundaries upon the construction of homes. Not everybody lived in homes like these. As a result of the Revolution, huge numbers of the working class died due to disease spreading through the cramped living conditions. Chest diseases from the mines, cholera from polluted water and typhoid were also extremely common, as was smallpox. Accidents in factories with child and female workers were regular. Dickens’ novels perhaps best illustrate this; even some government officials were horrified by what they saw. Strikes and riots by workers were also relatively common.
As the 18th century went on, the discontent gave place to revolts and to the growth of trade unions, which were the first expression of class conflict. Workers were united by a common experience and by common interests and they developed an ideology. For example, a group of English workers known as Luddites formed to protest against industrialization and sometimes sabotaged factories. In other industries the transition to factory production was not so divisive. Some industrialists themselves tried to improve factory and living conditions for their workers. One of the earliest such reformers was Robert Owen, known for his pioneering efforts in improving conditions for workers at the New Lanark mills, and often regarded as one of the key thinkers of the early socialist movement. This was also the first movement that opposed the worsening conditions brought about by mechanisation. The Luddites smashed machines to protest against the worsening conditions of the workers, but their activity resulted in the establishment of the death penalty for those who destroyed machines.
3.2 Geographic movements
With regards to the British geography, the revolution affected the north part of the country and the Midlands far more than the south. Until that moment it had been the south which had been the most advanced, populous and liberal, whereas the north remained almost empty, backward and conservative, but now, the north was pushing against the conservatism of the south.
The evidence of this contrast is a recurrent topic in the Victorian novels, for instance, Elisabeth Gaskell´s North and South, Dickens´s Bleak House or George Elliot´s Silas Marner.
The contrast between town and countryside was also obvious in Hardy´s works.
3.3 Political changes
In the shifting political landscape after the Reform Act, the old party loyalties of Whig and Tory took on new colours. Because of pushing through the new legislation, the Whigs were now seen as the party of reform; and during the 1830s they began to acquire a new name as Liberals .
At the same period the Tories began to call themselves Conservatives, making the most of their recent opposition to reform by suggesting that their policy was to conserve all that was best in the traditional British way of life.
In practice the two parties were rarely predictable in their attitudes to the great issues of the century. In broad terms the Liberals were more inclined to pass measures of social welfare (the Factory Act of 1833, the Ten Hours’ Act of 1847), yet the greatest campaigner on these issues was a Conservative MP, Lord Shaftesbury, and his party is responsible for the Mines Act of 1842.
Similar uncertainty surrounded the great issue of the 1840s, the repeal of the Corn Laws. Forced through parliament in 1846 by a Conservative prime minister, Robert Peel, the issue split the party. Eventually Peel’s own minority faction merged, after his death, with the Liberals.
It is the Conservatives who extended the franchise to bring in more voters in 1867, and the Liberals who continued the process in 1884. The two most aggressive prime ministers in their foreign policy, on behalf of British interests abroad, were the Liberal Palmerston and the Conservative Disraeli.
For these reasons the century was best described not under a succession of prime ministers of one party or the other, but in terms of the great issues of the day. One of the most pressing was the recent growth of new cities.
On the other hand, the discontent with the political organisation was extended through the first half of the 19th century. The political institutions were questioned, and the trade unions could not exercise much power against the employers.
The first political movement that demanded improvements for the working-class was the Chartism, which asked for a parliamentary reform to make the system more fair by achieving the representation of the workers, but they did not get any of their objectives.
The socialist movement appeared towards the middle of this century. Around 1850 Karl Marx went to live in Britain where he did most of his work studying the capitalist society.
3.4 Literature of the period
The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel. If the vitality of England during the reign of Queen Elisabeth the First culminated in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the dynamic of the industrial revolution made the Victorian period the golden age of the British novel.
Three are the main factors that contributed to develop novel as the main literary genre: the increase of a reading public with the expansion of lending libraries; the development of publishing in the modern sense of the word; the new topics to be dealt with, that is to say, the description of a concrete socials class to which the novels were addressed.
The novel, like the “medieval flabiau” (according to Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism) is a low mimetic literary form – it represents the way of life of real and ordinary people-. The Victorian novel-reader wanted to be first entertained, then close to what he was reading. Thus, the same impulse that makes modern television viewers so devoted to the popular soap-operas which deal with people like themselves with whom they can identify, helped to create the novel of this time.
In such a context, the reflection of reality is the subject matter of the new fiction and the world of subjectivity hardly has to do in this literary framework. As well, the collective character and the world of the street begin to be present in the writings, and most of the times the novel turns itself into an instrument of social enquiry.
Formally, the novel is divided into chapters because the most common way of publishing is the monthly series or instalments that appear in newspapers. In that way, the writer is allowed to know the readership´s opinion and it is frequent to change the plot of the story according to the public´s taste.
These social and political changes are reflected in much of the literature that was written in this period, and the best known author who dealt with such topics was Charles Dickens, but he was not the only one. The novel had become the most popular literary form, and it was used by all ideologies. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli was a novelist before entering politics. When he became a member of the Tory parliamentary group known as “Young England”, he presented their theories and their program of social reform in a series of novels dealing with the political, social and religious problems of the day.
On the other hand, such writers as Charles Kingsley and Elisabeth Gaskell, were very much in contact with the misery of the lower classes because of their religious background. They tried to remind the ruling class of their responsibilities to the workers and to promote social reform.
Kingsley was an Anglican clergyman member of the Christian Socialist movement. He favoured the improvement of the of working class conditions in his novels. His first novel, Yeast, dealt with the relations between rich and poor in the countryside. Alton Locke dealt with the political agitation of the Chartist movement. However, he was more famous as a writer of historical novels such as Hypathia, Westward Ho! and Hereward the Wake.
Elisabeth Gaskell was aware of the hardships of the working class in her condition as the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester. She wrote social novels such as Mary Barton, which reflects the class conflicts in the Manchester of the late 1830’s and Ruth, which presents the hardships of a single mother.
She also was famous for her portrayals of country life and for a biography of Charlotte Bronte.
William Thackeray, who was a contemporary of Dickens, Kingsley and Gaskell, dealt with very different topics in his novels. He came from a wealthy family and received a good education, but he wasted the family fortune and he entered the literate career through journalism. He would become famous as an author of historical novels and contemporary novels about the upper-middle class.
In his historical novels Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond he showed the connection between past historical times and the present. In the contemporary novels, known as the Pedennis sequence after the name of one of the characters, he presented a kind and attractive picture of the middle-class, or of what the middle-class would like to be. In his own time Thackeray was Dickens’ only rival.
Before focusing on Charles Dickens as the main exponent of the presentation of industrial society in the novel, we should remember that the topic of political and social changes was also present in many other novelists of the time such as the Bronte sisters, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy.
4 CHARLES DICKENS
4.1 Biography and works
English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens’s works are characterized by attacks on social evils, injustice, and hypocrisy. He had also experienced in his youth oppression, when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens’s good, bad, and comic characters, such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelist David Copperfield, or the trusting and innocent Mr. Pickwick, have fascinated generations of readers.
Charles Dickens was born in Landport, Hampshire, during the new industrial age, which gave birth to theories of Karl Marx. Dickens’s father was a clerk in the navy pay office. He was well paid but often ended in financial troubles. In 1814 Dickens moved to London, and then to Chatham, where he received some education. In 1824, at the age of 12, Dickens was sent to work for some months at a blacking factory, Hungerford Market, London, while his father John was in Marshalea debtor’s prison. Later this period found its way to the novel Little Dorrit (1855-57). John Dickens paid his £40 debt with the money he inherited from his mother; she died at the age of seventy-nine when he was still in prison.
In 1824-27 Dickens studied at Wellington House Academy, London, and at Mr. Dawson’s school in 1827. From 1827 to 1828 he was a law office clerk, and then a shorthand reporter at Doctor’s Commons. After learning shorthand, he could take down speeches word for word. At the age of eighteen, Dickens applied for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum, where he read with eager industry the works of Shakespeare, Goldsmith’s History of England, and Berger’s Short Account of the Roman Senate. He wrote for True Sun (1830-32), Mirror of Parliament (1832-34), and the Morning Chronicle (1834-36).
In the 1830s Dickens contributed to Monthly Magazine, and The Evening Chronicle and edited Bentley’s Miscellany. These years left Dickens with lasting affection for journalism and suspicious attitude towards unjust laws. His career as a writer of fiction started in 1833 when his short stories and essays to appeared in periodicals. A Dinner at Poplar Walk was Dickens’s first published sketch. It appeared in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833.
Sketches by Boz, illustrated by George Cruikshank, was published in book form in 1836-37. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was published in monthly parts from April 1836 to November 1837.
In 1836 Dickens married Catherine Hogart, the daughter of his friend George Hogarth, who edited the newly established Evening Chronicle. With Catherine he had 10 children. They separated in 1858. Some biographers have suspected that Dickens was more fond of Catherine’s sister, Mary, who moved into their house and died in 1837 at the age of 17 in Dickens’s arms. Eventually she became the model for Dora Copperfield. Dickens also wanted to be buried next to her and wore Mary’s ring all his life. Another of Catherine’s sisters, Georgiana, moved in with the Dickenses, and the novelist fell in love with her. Dickens also had a long liaison with the actress Ellen Ternan, whom he had met by the late 1850s.
Dickens’s sharp ear for conversation helped him to create colourful characters through their own words. The Pickwick Papers were stories about a group of rather odd individuals and their travels to Ipswich, Rochester, Bath, and elsewhere. It was sold at 1 shilling the installment (1836-37), and opened up a market for similar inexpensive books. Many of Dickens’s following novels first appeared in monthly installments, including Oliver Twist (1837-39). It depicts the London underworld and hard years of the foundling Oliver Twist, whose right to his inheritance is kept secret by the villainous Mr. Monks. Oliver suffers in a poor farm and workhouse. He outrages authorities by asking a second bowl of porridge. From a solitary confinement he is apprenticed to a casket maker, and becomes a member of a gang of young thieves, led by Mr. Fagin. Finally Fagin is hanged at Newgate and Mr. Barnlow adopts Oliver.
Nicholas Nickelby (1838-39) was a loosely structured tale of young Nickleby’s struggles to seek his fortune. This work reverted to The Pickwick Papers in shape and atmosphere, though the indictment of the brutal Yorkshire schools continued the important innovation in English fiction seen in Oliver Twist: the spectacle of the lost oppressed child as an occasion for pathos and social criticism. This was amplified in The Curiosity Shop.
Christmas Books helped him to obtain greater coherence. It resulted to be a new literary genre, introducing the great Christmas myth of modern literature. Dickens’ view of life was later to be described as a “Christmas philosophy”. Never very elaborated, this “philosophy” involved not much more than wanting the Christmas spirit to prevail throughout the year. This philosophy immediately entered the general consciousness. A Christmas Carol (1843) is one of Dickens’s most loved works, which has been adapted into screen a number of times. The character of Ebenezer Scrooge, the “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching” miser, has attracted such actors as Seymour Hicks, Albert Finney, Michael Caine, George C. Scott and Alastair Sim.
Barnaby Rudge (1841), set at the time of the ‘No Popery’ riots of 1780, and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) are exceptions. The latter was set in the years of the French Revolution. The plot circles around the look-alikes Charles Darnay, a nephews of a marquis, and Sydney Carton, a lawyer, who both love the same woman, Lucy. In both novels he attempted the historical novel, both set in the late 18th century and presented with great vigour and understanding the spectacle of large scale mob violence.
The wide range of moods and materials included in every novel and their serialised publication made it difficult to create a unity.
In Dombey and Son (1846-49), a pervasive uneasiness about contemporary society takes the place of an intermittent concern with specific social wrongs. Some of the corruptions of money and pride of place and the limitations of the “respectable” values are explored, virtue and human decency being discovered most often among the poor, humble and simple.
Among Dickens’s later works is David Copperfield (1849-50), where he used his own personal experiences of work in a factory. David’s widowed mother marries the tyrannical Mr. Murdstone. David becomes friends with Mr. Micawber and his family. Dora, David’s first wife, dies and he marries Agnes. He pursues his career as a journalist and later as a novelist. This novel has been described as a holiday from these larger social concerns and most notable for its childhood chapters. His novels after 1850 were much darker than their predecessors. Presenting a remarkably and increasingly sombre picture of contemporary society, they were often seen at the time as fictionalised propaganda about ephemeral issues. In his novels of the 1850’s he is politically more despondent, emotionally more tragic, the satire is harsher, the humour less genial and abundant. Technically the later novels are also more coherent, plots being often expressed through a more insistent use of imagery and symbols, as the fog in Bleak House, or the prison in Little Dorrit. His art there is more akin to poetry than to what is suggested by the photographic or journalistic comparisons. Characterisation has became more subordinate to the general purpose and design. Dickens is presenting characters of great complexity who provoke more complex reactions in the reader. With his secular hopes diminishing, Dickens becomes more concerned with “the great final secret of all life”. These novels attempt to explore the prospects of humanity at his time, and raise questions, still much debated, about the intelligence and profundity of his understanding of society. After the Crimea War (1855), he lost his political faith and hope, this desperation coincided with an acute state of personal unhappiness.
Bleak House (1853) belongs to Dickens’s greatest works of social criticism. The novel is built around a lawsuit, the classic case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which affects all who come into contact with it. Much of the story is narrated in the first person by a young woman, Esther Summerson, the illegitimate daughter of the proud Lady Dedlock and Captain Hawdon. The character of Harold Skimpole, an irresponsinbe and lecherous idler, is said to be based on the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt.
Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens published originally between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens’s ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor’s prisons—in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author’s own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens’s other critiques in this particular novel are about other issues with regards to the social safety net: industry, and the treatment and safety of workers; the bureaucracy of the British Treasury and the separation of people based on the lack of intercourse between the classes.
In 1857, in preparation for public performances of The Frozen Deep, a play on which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had collaborated, Dickens hired professional actresses to play the female parts. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his life. The exact nature of their relationship is unclear, as both Dickens and Ternan burned each other’s letters, but it was clearly central to Dickens’s personal and professional life. On his death, he settled an annuity on her which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin’s book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ellen Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and has subsequently been turned into a play by Simon Gray called Little Nell.
When Dickens separated from his wife in 1858, divorce was almost unthinkable, particularly for someone as famous as he was, and so he continued to maintain her in a house for the next 20 years until she died. Although they appeared to be initially happy together, Catherine did not seem to share quite the same boundless energy for life which Dickens had. Nevertheless, her job of looking after their ten children, and the pressure of living with a world-famous novelist and keeping house for him, certainly did not help.
An indication of his marital dissatisfaction was when, in 1855, he went to meet his first love, Maria Beadnell. Maria was by this time married as well, but seemed to have fallen short of Dickens’s romantic memory of her.
Great Expectations (1860-61) began as a serialized publication in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round on December 1, 1860. This novel resembles Copperfield in being a first person narration and in drawing on parts of Dickens’ personality and experience, and it is his most finely achieved novel, being a comment as much on the values of the age as on the characters, weaknesses and misfortunes. The story of Pip (Philip Pirrip) was among Tolstoy’s and Dostoyevsky’s favourite novels. G.K. Chesterton wrote that it has “a quality of serene irony and even sadness,” which according to Chesterton separates it from Dickens’s other works. Pip, an orphan, lives with his old sister and her husband. He meets an escaped convict named Abel Magwitch and helps him against his will. Magwitch is recaptured and Pip is taken care of Miss Havisham. He falls in love with the cold-hearted Estella, Miss Havisham’s ward. With the help of an anonymous benefactor, Pip is properly educated, and he becomes a snob. Magwitch turns out to be the benefactor; he dies and Pip’s “great expectations” are ruined. He works as a clerk in a trading firm, and marries Estella, Magwitch’s daughter.
Dickens participated energetically in all forms of the social life of the time. In the 1840s Dickens founded Master Humphrey’s Cloak and edited the London Daily News. He spent much time travelling and campaigning against many of the social evils with his pamphlets and other writings. In the 1850s Dickens was founding editor of Household World and its successor All the Year Round (1859-70). Although Dickens’s works as a novelist are now best remembered, he produced hundreds of essays and edited and rewrote hundreds of others submitted to the various periodicals he edited. Dickens distinguished himself as an essayist in 1834 under the pseudonym Boz. A Visit to Newgate (1836) reflects his own memories of visiting his own family in the Marshalea Prison. A Small Star in the Eas’ reveals the working conditions on mills and Mr. Barlow (1869) draws a portrait of an insensitive tutor.
Dickens lived in 1844-45 in Italy, Switzerland and Paris, and from 1860 one his address was at Gadshill Place, near Rochester, Kent, where he lived with his two daughters and sister-in-law. He had also other establishments – Gad’s Hill, and Windsor Lodge, Peckham, which he had rented for Ellen Ternan. His wife Catherine lived at the London house. In 1858-68 Dickens gave lecturing tours in Britain and the United States. By the end of his last American tour, Dickens could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. In an opium den in Shadwell, Dickens saw an elderly pusher known as Opium Sal, who then featured in his mystery novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood .
On 9 June 1865, while returning from France with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash in which the first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge that was being repaired. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens spent some time tending the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.
Dickens, though unharmed, never really recovered from the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood after a long interval.
Our Mutual Friend (1865), the second last novel Dickens wrote, started with a murder mystery. In the opening chapter a drowned man is found floating on Thames. The Italian writer Italo Calvino has called the novel “an unqualified masterpiece, both in its plot and in the way it is written.”). This novel continues his critique of monetary and class values. London is now grimmer than ever before, and the complacency, corruption and superficiality of the “respectable” society are fiercely attacked.
The Mystery of Edwin Drood was published in 1870, but Dickens did not manage to finish it. He planned to produce it in 12 monthly parts, but completed only six numbers. The story is chiefly set in the cathedral city of Cloisterham and opens in an opium den. “Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” the woman goes on, as he chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my head is so bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye, deary.” The choirmaster of the cathedral, John Jaspers, lives a double life, as an opium addict and a respected member of society. His ward, Edwin Drood, disappears on Christmas Eve, after a quarrel with Neville Landless. However, there is no trace of Edwin’s body. Dick Datchery, a disguised detective arrives to investigate the case.
He collapsed at Preston, in April 1869, after which his doctors put a stop to his public performances. Dickens died at Gadshill on suddenly of a stroke on June 8, 1870.
4.2 Characteristics of Dickens´s works
The Victorian writers do not form a coherent body, on the one hand, there were those ones who were at one with their public to a quite remarkable degree; on the other hand, there were those who wrote against their age being critical even hostile.
Charles Dickens belonged to the first group being the heir of a novelistic tradition that joined:
– the historical romances (Walter Scott, Smollet, Fielding), featured by great doses of adventures
– the novel of social concern, centred on the differences between classes
– the silver-folk novel, describing the lifestyle of the social elite
– the New Gate´s biographies of criminals from the cities underworld
– and above all, the stage melodrama, always romantic and sensational, blessed with a happy ending, starring heroes and heroines who after long-suffering stories proved their worth.
Through his novels Dickens showed himself a liberal reformer concerned with the problems in city life as a result of the Industrial Revolution. For more than a decade he directed energetically and with great insight and compassion a reformatory home for young female delinquents. His benevolent spirit, apparent in his writings, often found practical expression in his public speeches, fundraising activities and private acts of charity. The popularity of his novels was partly due to their publication in the serial form, but this also caused the earlier ones to be criticised for their formlessness. He appealed to all social classes, from the intellectuals to the labourers, and from that position he could become an important figure in asking for social reform. His novels were praised for their realistic presentation of life at all levels of society, and for their humanitarian interest. Through them the readers learned much about the actual conditions of life of the poor, a topic that had been avoided by most writers. Throughout his career as a novelist his social criticism became more mature, changing from the farce and the melodrama to the social satire and the psychological characterisation.
Dickens’s writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he calls one character the “Noble Refrigerator” — are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens’s acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his character’s names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Miss Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of “murder” and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.
Dickens’s technique of writing in monthly or weekly instalments (depending on the work) can be understood by analyzing his relationship with his illustrators. The several artists who filled this role were privy to the contents and intentions of Dickens’s instalments before the general public. Thus, by reading these correspondences between author and illustrator, the intentions behind Dickens’s work can be better understood. What was hidden in his art is made plain in these letters. These also reveal how the interests of the reader and author do not coincide. A great example of that appears in the monthly novel Oliver Twist. At one point in this work, Dickens had Oliver become embroiled in a robbery. That particular monthly instalment concludes with young Oliver being shot. Readers expected that they would be forced to wait only a month to find out the outcome of that gunshot. In fact, Dickens did not reveal what became of young Oliver in the succeeding number. Rather, the reading public was forced to wait two months to discover if the boy lived.
Another important impact of Dickens’s episodic writing style was his exposure to the opinions of his readers. Since Dickens did not write the chapters very far ahead of their publication, he was allowed to witness the public reaction and alter the story depending on those public reactions. A fine example of this process can be seen in his weekly serial The Old Curiosity Shop, which is a chase story. In this novel, Little Nell and her Grandfather are fleeing the villain Quilp. The progress of the novel follows the gradual success of that pursuit.
Dickens was, of all the Victorian novelists, the man of most comprehensive soul. He saw life from the point of view of the poor of a great city, he was not deceived by the blatant assurances of industrialism, but sought to mitigate its evil. He worked for practical reform without advocating any change in the system of society, because he believed that, when institutions and their administrations were remedied, the fundamental goodness of human nature would make the reform of individuals an easy matter. Nearly all his bad characters are capable of conversion and many are converted.
The characters are among the most memorable in English literature; certainly their names are. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Fagin, Mrs Gamp, Charles Darnay, Oliver Twist, Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Samuel Pickwick, Miss Havisham, Wackford Squeers and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.
Dickens loved the style of 18th century gothic romance, though it had already become a target for parody — Jane Austen‘s Northanger Abbey being a well known example — and while some of his characters are grotesques, their eccentricities do not usually overshadow the stories. One ‘character’ most vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his corpus.
The characters tend to fall into two classes, almost as sharply differentiated as are the virtues and vices of the old morality. But Dickens was not a creator of types, his figures are self-truly representative of humanity at large. When he drew form observation of real people the result is caricature. His creative imagination is exercised upon literally hundreds of characters, each unlike all the rest. This intense individualisation is accomplished by emphasising the innumerable external qualities which are present in different combinations and permutations in every man and woman, marking the distinctions of each from other. His is essentially a grotesque art, the art of the caricaturist, even when the result is not caricature. There is little effort to trace the development of character and, once the idiosyncrasy of “humour” is established, the person either remains what he is to the end of the story or undergoes a violent and unconvincing change for the sake of the plot.
A disconcerting feature of Dickens’ work in the creation of plots is the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the real, creatures who live only in his imagination, though they jostle with people drawn from actuality. Like Scott and unlike Jane Austin, Dickens focused the interest upon characters and episodes irrelevant to the main story. For plot, Dickens relied upon the devices of romance: the disguised lover, mistaken identity, tricks of trade, etc. The settings of his plots are always admirable. From the Gothic romances he inherited a love of the fantastic in places, houses, objects and names. He rendered marvellously the sights, sounds and smells of London –the fog, the dirt, the crowded streets, the suburbs.
Nowadays nobody questions the great legacy of Charles Dickens, but he was often criticized because the intense sentimentalism of his works, full of verbal excesses and the grotesque or angelical archetypism of his characters. Anyway, most of his works met an extraordinary acceptation in the readership of his time, which also determined their popular destiny.
It is true that he created situations and characters more allegoric than realistic, more dramatic than novelistic, but this sentimental rhetorica was in the service of a subversive and political function in a cultural environment before the Marxism, and it was also a literary device to call the attention of the wealthy Victorians who did not realize of the dark side of the happy progress brought by the industrial revolution.
Today no reader can imagine this period of the British history without the pages of Dickens´s novels.
4.3 Dickens on screen
Next to the works of Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduringly popular Sherlock Holmes, Dickens’ rich narratives and characters must surely rank as one of the most popular sources of material for filmmakers since the cinema’s beginnings.
As film technology developed during the late Victorian era, early cinema took on many of the cultural mores of that period as a natural expression of the times in which it arose – the use of melodrama being a clear example – and so Dickens’s popularity among early filmmakers – and not just British ones – was assured.
As early as 1897, The Death of Nancy Sykes (US) was shot as a stand-alone scene from the popular novel Oliver Twist. In fact there were nearly 100 versions of Dickens’ novels and stories made in the silent era alone. In 1901, a version of A Christmas Carol – re-titled Scrooge; or, Marley’s Ghost (d. W.R. Booth) for the film audience – offered a simple but entertaining tableaux of feature scenes from the book, although the surviving fragment suggests the bulk of the narrative is omitted. The Christmas books seemed to be popular choices for the adapters in the early part of the last century; D.W. Griffith, who would later be permanently yoked to Dickens because of their similar use of ‘parallel montage’, made a simple, surprisingly formulaic version of The Cricket on the Hearth (US, 1909), while A Christmas Carol was filmed again in 1911 (as Scrooge, d. Bantock Leadham) and 1914 (as A Christmas Carol, d. Harold Shaw).
By 1913, with Cecil Hepworth and Thomas Bentley’s production of David Copperfield, we begin to see a much more sophisticated attempt at dealing with the complexity of a Dickens text. Hepworth and Bentley take 108 minutes to relate the narrative visually. To a modern audience, the speed of the telling seems at times to undermine all coherence. As film historian Brian MacFarlane notes: “[The film’s] speed is not due to fluent camera work or editing but to its dispensing with character elaboration and its reducing of narrative to a skeleton framework, sometimes at the expense of motivation and logical development.” But such criticisms are essentially borne of historical disjunction and if we bear in mind that many magic lantern shows would have narrated a Dickens tale in 12 or at most 24 separate slides – not dissimilar in essence to the 1901 Scrooge – we can begin to see how David Copperfield might have appeared a spectacular and more meaningful affair to an Edwardian audience.
It is arguably not until the 1940s that filmmakers began to tackle the breadth of Dickens’ work with a style and confidence later filmmakers have often lacked. Alberto Cavalcanti’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickelby (1947) and the two adaptations by David Lean, Great Expectations (1946), with John Mills, Alec Guinness and Jean Simmons, and Oliver Twist (1948), with Guinness as a memorable Fagin, stand as examples of strong visual storytelling and manage to say something of relevance to their contemporary audiences. The final scenes of Great Expectations, for example, with Pip tearing opening the boarded windows of Satis House, have often been cited as a powerful metaphor for the feelings of hope and freedom in postwar Britain.
A Tale of Two Cities (d. Ralph Thomas, 1958) seems pale beside Lean’s efforts, yet it repays a second viewing and is certainly a faithful adaptation in that it follows in a simple, straightforward manner (thanks to screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke) the narrative line of the book.
Oliver! (1968), directed by Carol Reed with a verve and energy that surprised his many critics at the time, is a colourful adaptation of Lionel Bart’s musical, with a cast including an impressive Ron Moody as Fagin and Oliver Reed as a frighteningly misanthropic Bill Sykes.
In Joseph Hardy’s Great Expectations (1974), solid performances by Michael York and Joss Ackland make it a very watchable, if somewhat visually uninspiring take on what seems to be an enduringly relevant tale.
Dickens is a great inspiration for actors looking for a deep range of possible character interpretations. His characters exude three-dimensional personality, and often it is the minor characters who offer the most scope for memorable and even scene-stealing performances.This helps explain why both film and television versions of Dickens’ work regularly attract prestigious ensemble casts, as in the recent adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby (US/UK, d. Douglas McGrath, 2002), which suggests that film’s continuing interest in Dickens shows no sign of diminishing.
5 STUDY GUIDE
The reasons for Britain to become the first country which developed a modern industry were partly material and partly social and political.
The debate about the start of the Industrial Revolution also concerns the massive lead that Great Britain had over other countries. Some have stressed the importance of natural or financial resources that Britain received from its many overseas colonies or that profits from the British slave trade between Africa and the Caribbean helped fuel industrial investment. It has been pointed out, however, that slavery provided only 5% of the British national income during the years of the Industrial Revolution. Alternatively, the greater liberalization of trade from a large merchant base may have allowed Britain to produce and use emerging scientific and technological developments more effectively than countries with stronger monarchies, particularly China and Russia. Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the only European nation not ravaged by financial plunder and economic collapse, and possessing the only merchant fleet of any useful size (European merchant fleets having been destroyed during the war by the Royal Navy). Britain was favoured in the first place by the fact that it was a small island, so that most of the land was within easy reach of water transport. Because of that England had developed a large merchant and war fleet. The British military supremacy brought about an expansion of colonial commerce, which provided abundant raw materials and new markets in which to sell English manufactured products. At the same time, English laws prevented the creation of industry in the colonies.
As far as steelmaking is concerned, it was at the beginning of this century that Abraham Darby found out a way to obtain coke, a very pure product in which the impurities of mineral coal had been extracted. After this the English steel industry grew rapidly since coal and iron were very abundant.
However, the mining industry was under pressure because they had to dig deeper and deeper and they needed to find new ways to drain the underground water. The first engines, introduced around 1700, wasted too much energy and it was not until James Watt’s invention of the separate condenser in 1769 that fuel consumption could be reduced and that steam engines became popular. A further progress was possible after Watt’s success in obtaining a rotary movement from the engine that extended the possibilities of mechanisation.
Around the same time the textile industry started to develop thanks to the invention of machines for spinning and for weaving.
The development in industry and commerce was accompanied by an improvement of transportation.
At the end of the 18th century great attention was paid to roads and internal navigation both in rivers and through the construction of canals.
However, the most outstanding innovations in transport were made in the first half of the 19th century by applying the steam engine to the invention of the train and the steamboat.
Experiments with the railroad went on all through the first quarter of the century, and they finally resulted in the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first passenger and freight line. From then on the railroad construction in Britain grew very rapidly and it was most important for the continuing expansion of the industrial society.
The experimentation with steamships had been taking place at the same time, but it was not until the second half of the century that the use of steam for oceanic transport became common.
Universal male suffrage was obtained in the 1860’s, with the conservative prime minister Disraeli, who passed a considerable amount of social legislation in favour of workers.
It was also toward the end of the century when the suffragette movement, which demanded the vote for the women, and the Fabian Society, the origin of the Labour Party, were founded.
The changes that took place in economy were reflected in a change in the social organisation. Pre-industrial society was constituted by closed groups predestined by birth, industrial society, on the other hand, is a class-society formed by groups determined by money. The new society was constituted by an upper class of aristocrats, industrialists and merchants and a working class.
Ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of labour dominated by a pace set by machines. However, harsh working conditions were prevalent long before the industrial revolution took place as well. Pre-industrial society was very static and often cruel—child labour, dirty living conditions and long working hours were just as prevalent before the Industrial Revolution. Since the power was in the hands of the industrialists, laws favoured them and the conditions of the workers deteriorated. Craftsmen disappeared as a result of industry competition and the increase of production lead to a decrease of salaries. The exploitation of workers and the use of women and children as cheap labour was common. The working class was very different from the previous lower class of farmers and craftsmen.
Firstly, they did not own the means of production, they rather had to work for a wage. Furthermore, there was a high division of labour, so that the workers specialised in doing a job in which they often were mere appendices of machines. Finally, they felt alienated, having to work and live under horrendous conditions in the new industrial cities.
The Industrial Revolution led to a population increase, but the chance of surviving childhood didn’t improve throughout the industrial revolution. There was still limited opportunity for education, and children were expected to work. Employers could pay a child less than an adult even though their productivity was comparable; there was no need for strength to operate an industrial machine, and since the industrial system was completely new there were no experienced adult labourers.
Charles Dickens was born at Portsmouth in 1812, but his family moved to London when he was a child. The family went through constant economic problems due to his father’s debts. When he was ten he had to work while his family served a term in a debtor’s prison. However, later on Dickens managed to go to a school and after working at a solicitor’s office as a clerk he eventually became a newspaper reporter. After 1836, when he published The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, he started an important career as a novelist.
His career as a writer of fiction began in 1833 with short stories and essays in periodicals, and in 1837 his comic novel The Pickwick Papers, originally serialised in 20 monthly instalments, made him the most popular writer of his time in England. Pickwick began as a high spirited farce, but it displayed many attacks, satiric or denunciatory, on social evils and inadequate institutions, topical references and an encyclopaedic knowledge of London. Oliver Twist, Nickolas Nickelby and his subsequent novels show his heightened concern with vulgarity, and evil coexists with his basic optimism which appears in perhaps its purest form in the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield (1850). Afterwards, however, from Bleak House (1852) through Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), the inhuman aspects of Victorian industrial society become predominant, and the comic spirit, where it can be detected at all, is satirical.
Though containing much comedy still, Oliver Twist is centrally concerned with social and moral evils as the criminal world and the miserable life of the poor, under the officers’ corruption, in the workhouses that the New Poor Law had introduced.
Through his novels Dickens showed himself a liberal reformer concerned with the problems in city life as a result of the Industrial Revolution. For more than a decade he directed energetically and with great insight and compassion a reformatory home for young female delinquents. His benevolent spirit, apparent in his writings, often found practical expression in his public speeches, fundraising activities and private acts of charity. The popularity of his novels was partly due to their publication in the serial form, but this also caused the earlier ones to be criticised for their formlessness. He appealed to all social classes, from the intellectuals to the labourers, and from that position he could become an important figure in asking for social reform. His novels were praised for their realistic presentation of life at all levels of society, and for their humanitarian interest. Through them the readers learned much about the actual conditions of life of the poor, a topic that had been avoided by most writers. Throughout his career as a novelist his social criticism became more mature, changing from the farce and the melodrama to the social satire and the psychological characterisation.
Dickens was, of all the Victorian novelists, the man of most comprehensive soul. He saw life from the point of view of the poor of a great city, he was not deceived by the blatant assurances of industrialism, but sought to mitigate its evil. He worked for practical reform without advocating any change in the system of society, because he believed that, when institutions and their administrations were remedied, the fundamental goodness of human nature would make the reform of individuals an easy matter. Nearly all his bad characters are capable of conversion and many are converted.
Finally, we can say that next to the works of Shakespeare and Arthur Conan Doyle’s enduringly popular Sherlock Holmes, Dickens’ rich narratives and characters must surely rank as one of the most popular sources of material for filmmakers since the cinema’s beginnings.
As film technology developed during the late Victorian era, early cinema took on many of the cultural mores of that period as a natural expression of the times in which it arose – the use of melodrama being a clear example – and so Dickens’s popularity among early filmmakers – and not just British ones – was assured.
6 BIBLIOGRAPHY
– Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (2002)
– Dickens and the 1830s by Kathryn Chittick (1991)
– Dickens and Charity by Norris Pope (1979)
– Charles Dickens as Familiar Essayist by Gordon Spence (1977)
– The World of Charles Dickens by Angus Wilson (1970)
– Dickens at Work by Kathleen Tillotson and John Butt (1957)
– Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by Edgar Johnson (1953)
Dickens the Craftsman: Strategies of Presentation, edited by Robert B. Partlow, Jr. (1970);
The Inimitable Dickens by A.E. Dyson (1970);
Pointer, Michael, Charles Dickens On the Screen: the film, television, and video adaptations (Scarecrow Press, 1996)
Smith, Grahame, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2003)