Чарльз Диккенс: социальные проблемы в произведениях автора (доклад на английском языке)

Charles Dickens’ literary work. Social problems in the author’s novels.

Charles Dickens, in full Charles John Huffam Dickens, (born February 7, 1812, Portsmouth, Hampshire, England – died June 9, 1870, Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, Kent), English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era. His many volumes include such works as A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend.

Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity during his lifetime than had any previous author. Much in his work could appeal to the simple and the sophisticated, to the poor and to the queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly.

Dickens was not only the first great urban novelist in England, but also one of the most important social commentators who used fiction effectively to criticize economic, social, and moral abuses in the Victorian era. Dickens showed compassion and empathy towards the vulnerable and disadvantaged segments of English society, and contributed to several important social reforms. Dickens’s deep social commitment and awareness of social ills are derived from his traumatic childhood experiences. In his adult life Dickens developed a strong social conscience, an ability to empathise with the victims of social and economic injustices.

Dickens believed in the ethical and political potential of literature, and the novel in particular, and he treated his fiction as a springboard for debates about moral and social reform. In his novels of social analysis Dickens became an outspoken critic of unjust economic and social conditions. His deeply-felt social commentaries helped raise the collective awareness of the reading public. Dickens contributed significantly to the emergence of public opinion which was gaining an increasing influence on the decisions of the authorities. Indirectly, he contributed to a series of legal reforms, including the abolition of the inhumane imprisonment for debts, purification of the Magistrates’ courts, a better management of criminal prisons, and the restriction of the capital punishment.

In The Pickwick Papers (1837) Dickens created a utopian and nostalgic vision of pre-Victorian and pre-industrial England prior to a rapid industrialisation and urbanisation. Although the novel was designed to be comic, it is not free of Dickens’s characteristic social commentary, which would become more pronounced in his later novels. The descriptions of Eatanswill (Chapter 13) and the grim Fleet prison (Chapter 41) anticipate some of Dickens’s preoccupations with the Condition of England, which are revealed in his subsequent novels dealing with the darker and more disgusting side of Victorian times. The following passage from The Pickwick Papers anticipates Dickens’s lifelong concern with the effects of industrialisation on English society.

Dickens’s later novels contain some of his most trenchant pieces of social commentary. Beginning with his second novel, Oliver Twist, through Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Hard Times, and ending with Little Dorrit, Dickens totally rejected the claims of classical economics and showed his moral concern for the social well-being of the nation. His early novels expose isolated abuses and shortcomings of individual people, whereas his later novels contain a bitter diagnosis of the Condition of England.

Oliver Twist (1837-39), which represents a radical change in Dickens’s themes, is his first novel to carry a social commentary similar to that contained in the subsequent Condition-of-England novels. Dickens explores many social themes in Oliver Twist, but three are predominant: the abuses of the new Poor Law system, the evils of the criminal world in London and the victimisation of children.

The motif of child abuse in the context the Victorian education system is continued in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9). The novel contains a serious social commentary on the conditions of schools where unwanted children were maltreated and starved. Nicholas is sent to Dotheboys Hall, a school run by the cruel and abusive headmaster Wackford Squeers. The novel directs this ironical attack at Victorian public opinion, which was either unaware or condoned such treatment of poor children. Dickens was critical about the Victorian education system, which is reflected not only in Nicholas Nickleby, Hard Times and Our Mutual Friend, but also in his journalism and public speeches.

Dickens’s novella, A Christmas Carol (1843), is an anti-Malthusian tale. The author shows his disgust with the Malthusian principle of uncontrolled population growth. A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s response to the Children’s Employment Commission Report on the miseries suffered by many poor children. Dickens exposed suggestively selfishness and greed as the dominant features of his England. He described almost in a documentary manner Christmas celebrated by the working poor of early-Victorian England.

Bleak House (1852-53) is often called England’s first authentic contribution to modern detective fiction, it also sharply indicts the inequities in Victorian society. Dickens’s finest novel, although not his most popular, it exposes the abuses of the court of Chancery and administrative incompetence. For Dickens, the Court of Chancery became synonymous with the faulty law system, expensive court fees, bureaucratic practices, technicality, delay and inconclusiveness of judgments. Apart from the critique of the Chancery courts, Dickens also criticises slum housing, overcrowded urban graveyards, neglect of contagious diseases, electoral corruption, preachers; class divisions, and neglect of the educational needs of the poor.

The social consequences of industrialisation and urbanisation are perhaps most persuasively depicted in Hard Times (1854), which Dickens wrote at the prompting of urgent external circumstances. Hard Times is more than any other of his Condition-of-England novels influenced by Carlyle’s social criticism. It deals with a number of social issues: industrial relations, education for the poor, class division and the right of common people to amusement. It also draws on contemporary concern with reforming divorce laws.

Dickens as a social commentator exerted a profound influence on later novelists committed to social analysis. Some of his concerns with the Condition-of-England Question were further dealt with in the novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, George Gissing, George Orwell, and recently in the postmodern novels of Martin Amis and Zadie Smith.