Uses of realism in the classical Victorian novel: Charles Dickens

Uses of realism in the classical Victorian novel: Charles Dickens

The course outlines the way Ch. Dickens employs the mode of social realism, starting from

concrete social elements and his use of narrative strategies (point of view, language,

character). It discusses the rhetorical devices (suspense, humour, pathos, artificial motivations,

melodramatic effects, identifying phrases), his archetypal, mythical, allegorical imagery, as

well as his appeal to fantasy, fairy-tale characters, in a mixture between realism and romance.

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812 in Portsmouth. He spent the first 11 or 12

years of his childhood in Portsmouth which remained a pastoral setting later evoked in his

novels. The influence on his writing of his unhappy childhood experiences can be seen in the

fate of his many lost, abandoned and orphaned children (Oliver Twist is a child brought up in a

workhouse, David Copperfield is abandoned by his family in a hostile world, Cissy Jupe is

placed into the hands of hard, mercantile persons), in his lifelong interest in prisons and

imprisonment. The experience can be seen in his mature work as an indictment of a society

that is parentless, usurped by greed for money, social position and power in its many forms.

Later on, he became acquainted with the legal system of England, which he denounced in some

of his novels. His occupation as journalist developed the inclination to render with minute

details the speech of people, their physical appearance. His first novel, Pickwick Papers, was

devised as a series of comic misadventures of a group of middle class gentlemen, making use

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of the device of the club meant to provide a link among the desultory incidents presented in

instalments. It was followed by a series of novels in which comedy often existed side by

side with biting social criticism: Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old

Curiosity Shop (1840-41) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44).

Dombey and Son (1846-48) was followed by his famous David Copperfied (1849-50)

which presents a disguised account of his early upbringing. Bleak House (1852-53), the first of

what have been called the dark novels of his mature period is a complex vision of society,

formally distinguished by the device of having two narrative voices, the first person Esther

Summerson, and a third person narrator who conveys the panoramic vision of the judicial

system which Esther can only glimpse partially. Hard Times (1854) is Dickens's shortest

novel, and the only one set wholly outside London; its setting in the industrial north was the

vehicle for his attack on utilitarian abuses in the schoolroom as much as the factory. He also

wrote one of his most admired works, Great Expectations (1860-61), combining an unusual

degree of psychological realism with a complex vision of society.

Dickens enjoyed a wide popularity as a spokesman of his age, a social critic as well as an

inventor of comic characters and plots. His powerful imagination is fascinated by details of

social observation on which he builds chapters, characters. As documents, his writings point to

specific institutions and realities of nineteenth century England: child labour, workhouses, the

Courts of Law, schools, the debtors' prison. His comic inventiveness has created an enormous

variety of caricatures, of eccentric and highly coloured characters. They seem intenser than

human beings, being associated with symbolic art and the literature of the absurd. According to

N. Frye, the structure that Dickens uses for his novels "is the New Comedy structure, the

main action being a collision of two societies which we may call for convenience the

obstructing and the congenial society . Actually he fuses the myths of spring/comedy and

summer/romance with characters that may belong to the high-mimetic on the background of

Victorian low-mimetic fiction. Exploring the mode of social realism, his observations start from

obvious themes which are recreated as new entities or defamiliarized, as the Russian formalist

critics would call them. Such is the case, for instance of his fictional emblems called

Mr.Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend, Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Mr. Gradgrind in Hard

Time, the Deportment in Bleak House (humans turned into machines, the bleak shadow of

social power defended by the forces of a rotten state as typified by the legal institution).

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Although these characters have been called by E.M. Forster "flat characters", "types or

caricatures, as they are constructed round a single idea or quality", yet the author succeeds

"to achieve effects that are not mechanical and a vision of humanity that is not shallow".

Dickens's characters begin by being a cast of stock characters engaged in conflicts, such as

orphans/heroes, villans, upstarts and hypocrites/alazons, social types that are further on turned

into highly symbolic emblems compelling the imagination, rich with significance. These

changes are operated by symbolic transformations which add imaginative associations as well

as often dramatic, comic ones. We may remark that Dickens's reputation rests upon fantastic

fertility in character creation, the depiction of childhood and youth (David Copperfield and Pip

are unmatched elsewhere in British fiction), robust comic creation (in the tradition of Swift,

Fielding, Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Richard Sheridan; he usually relies on rhetorical devices

such as the effects of suspense, sympathy, pathos, the character's behaviour, gestures, language,

identifying phrases), unconscious artistry in his archetypal, mythical symbols, deeply

ingrained in the psyche, that grip the reader's imagination and appeal to his fantasy (pointing

to Dickens's allegiance to romantic devices). The elements of concrete social realities acquire

the significance of nightmarish forces, haunting the mind. Chesterton seems to have sensed this

quality of Dickens's art: "Dickens uses reality while aiming at an effect of romance; whereas

Thackeray used the loose language and ordinary approaches of romance, while aiming at an

effect of reality".

Many of his main heroes are children, virtuous and rather flat as they do not experience

inner conflicts. Melodramatic effects are usually achieved by means of the child-herot and this

brings them close to moralities and allegories. To achieve that, he resorts to coincidences,

sensational elements, artificial motivations, final discoveries that explains the puzzling

situations. The moral has definite educational purposes and provides poetic justice. With

Dickens, the evil is not the given essence of the world, but only an aspect of it which might

be removed, replaced by a positive system of values.

The moral has definite educational purposes and provides poetic justice. Thus, in

building up his characters, the novelist reduces them to their main features but also grants

them a symbolic value. With Dickens, the evil is not the given essence of the world, but only

an aspect of it which might be removed, replaced by a positive system of values.

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In Great Expectations, both Pip and Estella are orphans that initially belong to

different social and psychological categories. Pip is the village orphan, helped by a series of

lower-class, virtuous benefactors: his uncle Joe Gargery, the blacksmith, Abel Magwitch, the

convict, Herbert Pocket, his impoverished urban friend. Estella, on the other hand has been

educated by her benefactress - a vengeful aristocrate, Miss Havisham.

The mysterious construction of the plot makes Pip assume that she is his unnamed

benefactor who through lawyer Jaggers provides money to send him to London to become

a gentleman. This deceptive benefaction affects Pip's outward and inward progress in life

and then Estella's. Miss Havisham will eventually admit her own villany not only in respect to

Pip but also in respect to Estella, whom she has spiritually maimed. She hypocritically uses

her wealth and social status to harm both Pip and Estella, while playing the role of

benefactress. At first, Pip is turned into an urban snob addressed by Joe as Mr. Pip. His

pretenses of gentility, his "great expectations" make him intolerable, but his whole appearance

of gentility is a sham built upon the generosity of the coarse criminal Magwitch. Magwitch,

whose other name is Abel, is the only real social benefactor and at the same time social victim

(not Miss Havisham, a marriage-victim, abandoned by Compeyson). There is a connection

between Pip, the helpless orphan and Magwitch, the convict, as both are socially weak human

beings. Pip's great expectations of becoming "a gentleman" are critically retold by old,

maturer Pip, the novel being a sort of penance for earlier subservience to false values. Pip's

gentility appears as parasitism, the work condemning the leisure-class ideal of

contemporary society. Dickens achieves here a memorable success in depicting psychic

growth, spiritual transformation and ripening of his central character.

David Copperfield, semi-autobiograhical, is one of the best-loved novels in English and

Dickens's favourite among his works. It traces the development of David from childhood

through his widowed mother's re-marriage to Mr. Murdstone. School - Mr. Creakle's

establishment, like that of Dr.Blimber in Dombey and Son forms part of Dickens's attack

on unimaginative methods of education. The author traces the character's progress, following

his brief employment and toil at his step-father's business, relieved only by the amiable but

improvident Micawber family (prototypes of his own parents), salvation at the practical hands

of his aunt Betsey Trotwood. Age and experiece have certainly given his aunt a wisdom and

feistiness which combine to make her one of the stongest, most independent-minded of all

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Dickens's fictional characters. Lodging with the Wickfields, he is attracted by Agnes Wickfield

and repelled by Uriah Heep, the obsequious clerk. Shadowing this evolution is a less developed

but more autobiographical trajectory as David works first as a recorder of parliamentary

business and then as an increasingly succesful novelist.

The sense of time in Copperfield is private, subjective, lyrical, focussed in the

consciousness of the narrator as he sets down "the written memory" of his life. The long

rhythm of his memory makes possible the shift from picaresque to bildungsroman in this

novel. The picaresque plot of fortune is still there in the story of an orphan boy who

makes his way through the world, but this progess is enriched by the complex process of

memory. David survives early hardships, but others don't. There is the death of his mother at

the hands of the Murdstones, the destruction of the Yarmouth home of Peggotty and Litle

Em'ly by Steerforth, the crippled lives of Rosa Dartle and Steerforth's mother, the death of

Dora. Memory unifies the tone of the novel, while its structure owes much to Dickens's

exploitation of the serial form that links together a large cast of characters in relationship

to the central subject, that of "growing up", in a hauntingly poetic creation.

Hard Times eschews a vast canvas in favour of a relatively small number of characters.

Thomas Gradgrind, Member of Parliament for Coketown - a city in a perpetual shroud of

industrial smoke, resounding constantly with the unceasing rhythm of factories, has brought

up his children as to believe and acknowledge only facts and profit. The novel is an attack

against intransigent Utilitarianism; their philosophy means worship of facts that are to

suppress imagination, emotion, humanity.

Very few of Dickens's characters are simply humorous creations or eccentrics, as they carry the

weight of their symbolic meaning which dramatically informs his fiction.

Homework

1. Read Ch. Dickens's Great Expectations and explain why it has a fairy-tale quality/

Can Pip be considered a Victorian picaro? Great Expectations as a Bildungsroman.

2. Coincidence and accident in Dickens's fiction.

3. Narrative strategies in Dickens's fiction.