CHAPTER 3
CHARLES DI CHARLES DICKENS :
A NOVELIST
Introduction : Dickens was the great novelist who was also a great entertainer, probably the greatest entertainer, in the history of Points to Remember English fiction. The nature of his 1. Introduction genius was such that he had to 2. Expression of Age identify himself with his public. His 3. Comic Novelist novels were all issued in serials, 4. Unity generally in monthly instalments. 5. A Typical Victorian novelist They explain many of the structural
6. Realism and Fantasy deficiencies of his work. Every
7. Hasty Composition
8. Creation of a New World instalment had to come to a climax of
9. Faults suspense; action and excitement had
had | 10. Style to be maintained at all costs. The | 11. Greatness fluctuations of public demand, | 12. Conclusion. consequently, tended to dictate the course of future action.
His relationship with his public is most clearly seen in his role of reformer. He attacked the injustices of the poor law, delays in administration of justice, the cruelties of schoolmasters, imprisonment for debt and so on. david copperfield book pdf
Expression of Age : Dickens was the expression of the conscience of his age. He showed the readers what they themselves thought and felt of the great social problems that confronted them. They discovered what they thought and felt only when they read Dickens and perhaps, not till then. He was essentially a comprehensive novelist. He took in all classes of society and created a world with all the variety of the actual world. Dickens was not a realist novelist. david copperfield book pdf
Comic Novelist : Dickens is the greatest comic novelist in English and also the most truly poetic novelist. As fantastist, he forces us to accept the world he creates by the sheer compelling power of the intensity of his imagination. He was an hallucinatory imagination, and so long as he remains within the comic and satiric or the melodramatic, he forces us to share the hallucination. His many defects do not matter at all. He was a great original. His novels are full of high spirits, the joy in rough-and-tumble and the picaresque sequence of events,
Unity: Although, from the first to the last there is unmistakable unity in Dickens, his genius submitted to certain changes, without perhaps ever attaining any great oxpansion. No writer has ever had a more marvellous faculty of depicting what may be called town-scenery than Dickens. He can give the interior of a house or room, the ‘atmosphere’ of furniture, the general air of a street as no one had ever given. He can people these scenes with figures which, at their best, have a vivacity, an arresting power, inferior of none. He can adjust scenes and figures for several purposes, but above all for the purpose of humorous action tending slightly to the farcical, with a felicity in hig earlier and better days almost unerring, and even in his later seldom far out.
A Typical Victorian Novelist : Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist since Scott, and the most typical of Victorian writers. English fiction had been straying from the peculiarly national type when the publication of the Pickwick Papers revealed a new writer of very great genius, and brought back to consciousness that order of fiction which had grown almost out of date and out of use. Here could be seen, not merely an extraordinary power of invention and lenstle of movement, but a spirit of such boundless merriment as the literature of the world had never seen before. The peculiarity of the manner of Dickens is its excessive and minute
cy within certain arbitrary limits of belief.: david copperfield book pdf
Realism and Fantasy : Though usually realistic, he is scarcely ever real. He builds up, out of all that he remembers, artificial conditions of life, great worlds swarming with human vitality, but not actuated by truly human instincts. He puts into our hands a microscope and we watch the adventures of the people of his imagination. These adventures are sometimes strangely violent and grotesque but they are perfectly consistent, and we watch them with excited attention. Our interest in the show is always sustained by this high-spirited liveliness, his versatility and his comic vigour which are all very extraordinary.
Dickens leads up rapidly through the crowded mazes of a fairyland. It has great variety and is sometimes comic, at other times sentimental and at still other times horrific. We are all the time aware that Dickens is the creator of this fairyland. He is so original and clever that he makes these radically visionary figures as actual, commonplace and realistic as we daily see in various shapes all round us.
Hasty Composition : Dickens’s work is very unequal and much that he wrote is hasty and ill-considered. In the earlier novels his plot construction is often faulty, and by the time he had gained a certain degree of mastery over the art of story telling, his imagination and his creative power had somewhat weakened. Dickens’s characterization is never very profound or deep, and his psychology is often at fault. Most of his characters have a fixed description; they are just good or bad. His villains are absurd and laughable figures; they do not seem to be common human beings. Even his comic characters tend to become repulsive machine-like persons. They go on repeating some catchword and gestures. His characters are generally static; they neither grow nor change. Barkis is always ‘willing’, Uriah Heep is always ‘humble’ and Micawber is always waiting for ‘something to turn up’. Dickens had a very strong tendency for caricaturing that had a bad effect on his characterization. david copperfield book pdf
Creation of a New World : He created an altogether new world of his own, but this world is often fantastic and lopsided. It has been said that he held a distorting mirror of life, that he always looked at things with the eyes of a child. It has been pointed out that the life with which his scenes and characters are provided is not altogether human. His world is rather a huge, changing group of images of his own creation. His range of character was, of course, extensive but it was peculiar and strictly limited. It seems he could draw persons of the lower and the lower-middle classes only. He certainly did not draw any beyond them. It has sometimes been suggested that he did not wish to do so, but it cannot be accepted because he tried and failed to do it. His characters of the upper and the upper-middle classes are monsters not suited to any scheme that we can possibly think of. david copperfield book pdf
Faults : Dickens had other faults too. He had many irritating mannerisms, a lack of anything like real acquaintance or sympathy with great and high regions of thought, and an unfortunate inclination to talk about what he did not understand. He is often, particularly in the earlier novels, intensely melodramatic with great excitement and emotion. The fact that many of his scenes and plots are theatrical in style and manner is proof enough that he had a great potentiality for the drama. People of his own generation were deeply moved by Dickens’s sentiment and pathos but they often leave us cold. They are frequently cheap and sentimental in a silly and tearful way. His device for achieving the pathetic, the description in detail of the deaths of little children, was rather poor. He could describe the horrible and he could be painfully emotional, almost melodramatic, but perhaps he never achieved real tragic greatness.
Style: Dickens’s style is clear, rapid and workmanlike but it is not polished or scholarly, not at its best even. It is typical of the style of a journalist. But it is not free from mannerisms, and in the early novels we come across commonplace puns, peculiar expressions and using too many words unnecessarily and in a tiresome manner. The reader is always irritated by such affectations. Sometimes, however, Dickens david copperfield book pdf
rose very high. In his more aspiring flights, particularly when Greatness : But, on the whole, in spite of numerous Dickens is one of the greatest of English novelists. He humorist; he is a great creator; he has a remarkably fi comprehensive imagination, and his attitude to life is phil. He is certainly the most famous and the most typical of the i novelists. His work has all the chief features common to the vi novel : a large variety of characters and events; false sentin characters that are largely wooden; loose plots; pathos sometimes is rather overdone; absence of sex and animal side nature; and limited subject matter. They have good narratis creative imagination and rich humour and a large range covering the whole life. Dickens’s novels, like the Victorian novela is unequal. The following causes make it a strange compound strength and weakness : It is in the first stage and not yet a noun literary form. It is an entertainment and therefore, the novelist horten take into account the tastes of his readers. The novel had not vet evolved its own laws and had much of the artificial in it. High literar standards were neither yet called for nor possible. Moral views of the time made it necessary to avoid sex and any frank treatment of the animal side of life. The novel had to be a delightful reading like David Copperfield
Conclusion : Thus, it is clear that Charles Dickens is the true representative novelist of Victorian Era. His language contains learned words. He possesses a great sense of creative imagination too. According to David Cecil : david copperfield book pdf