Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities – English – UGC NET – Notes

Charles Dickens: Life and Works

• Charles Dickens was born as the son of a clerk from the lower gentry of the professional class. He received varied types of schooling—sometimes no schooling and sometimes tutoring. He was sensitive about his humble origins as a member of middle-class society.
• The unhappy circumstances of his own childhood, which included his father’s imprisonment for debt and his own much-hated job at the blacking factory, were a sore point with him. Nevertheless, he was humane and had a sentimentally humanitarian attitude towards human problems.
• He began his career as a reporter in the ecclesiastical law court of Doctor Commons. Later, he was a member of True Sun and Morning Chronicle. Beginning a little more than as a comic journalist, he soon discovered his special gifts as a novelist.
• At twenty-five, he found himself the most popular English novelist. He began as a follower of the traditions of Smollett, whom he had read with great enthusiasm and who may be regarded as his master.
• Dickens began with great sense of life and little sense of form. Sketches by ‘Boz’ (1836) is lively journalism, but with The Pickwick Papers (1836–1837) we can see the development of his writing. He began his career in the picaresque tradition. Pickwick began as burlesque but soon emerged as picaresque comedy.
• Dickens was the most instinctive of the great English novelists, and sentimentality was often his way of handling difficult moral problems, as in Nicholas Nickleby. Oliver Twist is the first of his novels to concentrate on specific social ills. With Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens first showed his real stature as a novelist.
• Dombey and Son (1846–48) joins richness of character and incident to unity of moral purpose with new maturity. In David Copperfield (1849–50), autobiography is subdued into art with remarkable skill. Bleak House also shows similar strengths.
• In Hard Times (1854), Dickens dealt with the morality of the utilitarian industrialist and its effect on human happiness. In Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, Dickens achieves a mature artistic mastery.
• Dickens spent the last years of his life giving public readings of his works.

Dickens: Style and Reputation

• Regarded as the first great English novelist of the city, Charles Dickens is an urban novelist. Not only are his themes city-oriented, but he writes in a distinctly urban way. As Terry Eagleton points out, Dickens’ prose style is full of energy, hyperbole, extravagant gestures, rapid sketches, melodrama, and theatrical display. His style is florid and vivacious, often marked by flights of fantasy.
• The most endearing quality of his work is its humour. He is a pure humourist, using language rich in comic invention. Dickensian characters are among the most memorable in English literature. They are often whimsical and idiosyncratic, with names suggesting their traits—such as Mr Murdstone in David Copperfield. Many characters are drawn from real life: Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (based on Leigh Hunt) and the partly autobiographical David Copperfield.
• As Virginia Woolf observes, Dickens reshapes our psychological vision through vivid characterization. George Santayana calls him a great mimic. According to Raymond Williams, Dickens portrays characters vividly but externally, often defined by striking features. Eagleton notes that Dickens defines characters by distinctive traits and unique speech patterns.
• His comic characters fall into two groups: pure humour and savage comedy. Examples of pure humour include Pickwick, Micawber, and Mrs Gamp. Characters of savage comedy—used to attack social injustice—include Bumble, Uriah Heep, and Gradgrind.
• Though critics argue his humour lacks subtlety, it is marked by depth and humaneness. His novels, while addressing social problems, are not dark but energetic and lively. Dickens is also the first major English novelist to place children at the centre of fiction.
• Characters such as Oliver Twist, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield, and Amy Dorrit highlight child suffering. His works are filled with prematurely aged children and childish adults, including figures like The Artful Dodger, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit.

Reputation:

• According to F. R. Leavis, Dickens was a great genius, placing him among the immortal classics. Leavis praised him as a great entertainer and even ‘a great poet,’ claiming that in mastery of language only Shakespeare surpassed him.
• Dickens has often been criticized for his characterization. Using E. M. Forster’s terms, his characters are considered “flat” rather than “round”—often described by a single dominant trait, such as Uriah Heep in David Copperfield. Yet this does not mean they are poorly drawn. As Edward Albert observes, Dickens creates a whole world of people, rich in multiplicity.
• Leavis initially dismissed Dickens as merely an entertainer but later recognized him as a serious novelist—acknowledging that he is both a serious novelist and a great entertainer.
• In the words of Terry Eagleton, Dickens lacked the intellectual depth of George Eliot or the psychological subtlety of Henry James, but possessed prodigious imaginative power and superb rhetorical mastery. He remained connected to caricature, melodrama, popular theatre, and everyday culture. No other English novelist has been so wildly popular or so uproariously funny.
• Leo Tolstoy regarded Dickens as the best of English novelists and considered David Copperfield his finest work. James Joyce paid tribute through parody in Ulysses, while Virginia Woolf, despite her reservations, acknowledged the merit of David Copperfield.