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Life and works

Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood since his father went to prison for debt and he had to work in a factory at the age of twelve.

This experience influenced his works. His best-know works are: Sketches by Boz: journalistic sketches containing episodes of everyday London life. The Pickwick Papers: a series of adventures of a club of sportsmen. Oliver Twist: in which through the story of an orphan boy, Dickens attacks the workhouse system and denounces the degradation of poverty. David Copperfield: his best-know work, full of autobiographycal experiences. Hard Times: which denounces the wrongs of society and the terrible conditions of industrial workers. Great Expectations: his masterpiece, this novel is about the dramatic experience of a young boy as he painfully grows up.

Features and themes

Dickens is the foremost representative of the Victorian novel.

The Painter of English life

Dickens is a subtle observer of London life. He knew from personal experience the life led in factories and is able to give us a detailed description of British homelife, of school system, of the Law system, of the domestic life of lower  or middle-class people, with every detail of manners appearance and dress.

Characters

Dickens's world is populated by hundreds of characters divided into good and evil, but he doesn't create types. Each character is unlike the others, each one is an individual.

Social and humanitarian novels

Some of Dickens's novels are defined as social or humanitarian. He used fiction to denounce the vices and the evils of his age. He exerted a considerable influence on the reform movement of the age by shedding light on the brutality of some schools on the vices of the criminal world, on the dirt of London slums and on the conditions of their inhabitants in a period of industrial expansion.

Limitations

His plots lack real unity; his main characters are often superficially portrayed and he shows a lack of real psychological insight; his sentimentalism and pathos are excessive; his comic scenes are exaggerated and his tragic scenes are too melodramatic.

Merits

His characters cover a large range of people and include some of the most successful characters in English Literature; his style is fluent and effective, full of photographyc details which became material for cinema; his powerful imagination has created a lot of incidents and situations; his plots can hold the reader's attention till the end.