THE SOCIETAL REFLECTION IN DICKENS
NOVELS OF OLIVER TWIST AND GREATEXPECTATIONS
Ms.A.Prema,
Assistant Professor,
Erode Sengunthar Engineering College,
Erode- 638057.
premansivam@gmail.com.
Abstract: Charles Dickens is the Shakespeare of English Fiction. 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 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.
He has been labeled both a master of characterization and a writer who creates caricatures
meant to embody certain generic assumptions rather a writer capable of creating full fleshedout human beings. Even in the midst of corruption and degradation, the essentially passive
characters remain pure-hearted and steers away from evil. In common with many nineteenthcentury authors, Dickens used the novel as a repository of social conscience. 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.
This paper will focus on the societal reflection like power of money, toils of children,
merciless treatment, defective educational systems and other problems related to child life
through the characters of Dickens’ selected novels such as Great Expectations and Oliver
Twist. He was much more successful than his predecessors in exposing the ills of the
industrial society including class division, poverty, bad sanitation, privilege and meritocracy
and the experience of the metropolis.
The greatest novelist of the age is undoubtedly Charles Dickens. He is the first novelist
to protect openly against the corruption and social maladjustments of the age. He admits the
common people of London to the arena of English novel. In reality one has only to read the
novels of Dickens to know the common life of England during the Victorian Age with all its
difficulties, hardships and miseries. His greatness lies in his deep humanism. This paper deals
with the issues of the society such as, child mistreatment, influence of money, cruelty,
defective educational system, poor laws and sufferings of poor people. Never before a writer
was so much interested in the commonness of the people. Prof. Carew writes,
“He was of all the Victorian novelists, the man of most comprehensive soul. He saw life, as no
other earlier novelist has seen it….He worked for practical reforms without advocating any
change in the system of society because he believed that, when institutions and their
administration were remedied the fundamental goodness of human nature would make the
reform of individualism easy matter.”
Although the Industrial Revolution fostered urban growth, it is unfortunate that the
number of the poor also increased. Many of them lived under squalid conditions with poor
sanitation leading to fatal diseases and even death. Being a socially conscious writer, Dickens
depicts the world in which he lives, as a strategy to raise awareness in his readers of what was
really happening, and hopefully, to bring social reforms.
Apart from the poor, Dickens also portrays the brutal treatment of children at the
workhouses. This paper will show that Dickens was an obstinate critique of the Poor Law and
its administration. Furthermore, it will be proven that Dickens also abhorred child labour
because of his own childhood experience. Moreover, his repugnance is also noted in the way
he creates child characters like Oliver Twist who are mistreated and exploited as child workers.
DEPICTION OF CHILDHOOD
Dickens is a marevellous delineator of childhood. None of the English novelists
have superseded him as the describer of childhood. The pictures of childhood in his novels
are very real and life-like. Some of his immortal child creations are Oliver Twist, David
Copperfield, and Pip. These characters are so marevellously drawn that Dickens has been
declared as ‘capital at a baby’. According to George Orwell, “no novelist has shown the same
power of entering into the child’s point of view” as Dickens. It has been rightly said that
Dickens did not merely describe a child but became a child for the time-being. It has been
rightly said that Dickens is fully capable of deep insight into and convincing portrayal of
childhood. Childhood enchants him, holds him in its tight magic spell. In Oliver Twist,
Dickens depicts some of the major characteristics of a child’s mind. Both Oliver and Pip yearn
for a sympathetic look and gets emotionally attached to anyone like Mr. Brownlow, Nancy
and Estella who ever appear to love him. Along with this longing for affection is their natural
innocence that makes the children thinks of everyone innocent.
Both his novels depict child-life with power and dignity. The sensitive and sensible
nature of children, their innocence and their spirit of realization are shown in the following
utterance of Pip: “I took the opportunity of being alone in the country-yard to look at my
coarse hands and my common boots. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled me
now…….” In Oliver Twist Dickens presents a portrait of the macabre childhood of a
considerable number of Victorian orphans. The orphans are underfed, and for a meal they are
given a single scoop of gruel. Oliver, one of the oppressed children, dares to ask for more
gruel and is severely punished.
“The evening arrived; the boys took their places. The master, in his cook’s uniform,
stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants ranged themselves behind him;
the gruel was served out; and a long grace was said over the short commons. The
gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his
next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and
reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and
spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity: ‘Please, sir, I want some
more.’ [15]
This scene, which has become “the most familiar incident in any English novel” (Sanders,
412), strongly appealed to the Victorian conscience. Dickens challenged the Victorian idea of
charity for the so-called “deserving poor”. He showed persuasively that the workhouse was a
failed attempt to solve the problem of poverty and unwanted children.
CRIME AND CRUELTY IN THE SOCIETY
Dickens novels are social criticism. To him, “the contemporary scene is always
important. Themes concerned with the problems of mid-nineteenth century society, its familiar
scenes and people were the chosen subjects of his fiction.”Accordingly, Oliver Twist is a
fierce and indignant protest against the contemporary practices. In the novel the reader can
notice the lurid intensity of a claustrophobic world of darkness, the world of the workhouse
brings forth its dreadful harvest of crime and vice. The cruelty to which Oliver has been
subjected first at the hands of the workhouse authorities, secondly in the undertakes of
household and finally at the hands of Fagin and his gang. The Victorian workhouse world was
full of gloom and disaster. The children led a very pitiable life. Children were used and
employed as paid mourners.
The attitude of cruelty is clear in the manner in which Pip as a child treated by Mrs.
Joe and Mrs.Havisham. Mrs. Joe is his own sister; yet she is a hard hearted lady who treats
him very roughly and often reminds Pip of those sacrifices which she has made for his sake. It
is not only Mrs.Gargery who ill-treats Pip, but are other people like PumPlechook. Pip
devolves strong hatred for all these people. Both Oliver and Pip became the victim of illtreatment.
SOCIAL EVILS
I) MONEY: The Victorian society is dominated by money. Most of the characters in the
novel are running after money. Humphrey House in his book, “The Dickens’s World” states
that the novel “is a statement of money can do, good and bad, of how it can change and make
distinctions of classes, how it can prevent virtue. Pip sees many relatives who are toadies and
humbugs. These relations fawn upon him with the basest meanness; even Herbert is a nice
fellow but greedy. Jagger, a skillful and worthy lawyer, believes in the power of money.
II) CLASS COSCIOUSNESS: Pip considered Estella as his great expectations. She is queen
of his heart. But from the very beginning she is very proud and insulting. She makes Pip
realize that he is a common laboring boy, that his hands are dirty, his shoes are old his clothes
are coarse and that he is a low-lived creature.
III) CONDITION OF PRISION: The condition of prisoners during the Victorian age also
reveals the injustice of society. When Pip pays a visit to New Gate prison, he carries a
sentence of shame. The treatment given to the prisoners was not correct.32 men and women
have been sentenced to death. Dickens as a social reformer conveys the message that death is
not suitable punishment for the prisoners. He believes in the importance of forgiveness in this
regard.
DEPRIVATION OF EDUCATION TO THE POOR CHILD
Education is vital for every human being as they go through the stages of development. Every
minor has a mandatory right to receive education as this fosters mental and psychological
child development. In Victorian England, it was believed that “the training to be obtained in
primary and grammar school was thought to in here as much in attitude as in the acquisition of
skills fundamental to future employment”
However, not every child has the opportunity to go to school or receive at least some form of
education. Poverty is one of the major causes that deprives children the right to education. In
the nineteenth century in Britain, there were a substantial number of children from poor
families because the fees were too expensive. Moreover, the education system offered to the
poor was quite inefficient as illustrated by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations:
“Mr Wopsle’s great aunt kept an evening school in the village;
that is to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited
means and unlimited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from
six to seven, in the society of youth who paid twopence per week
each . . . . . and Mr Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we
students used to overhear him reading aloud in a most dignified
and terrific manner. . . .” (49)
The parody of Mr Wopsle’s great aunt’s evening school is a satire of the education provided
for the lower class. Pip also comments that he learnt the alphabet from Biddy and neither from
Mr Wopsle nor his aunt which indicates that neither of them were doing their duty of
educating the keen learners.
Although some children went to school, their attendance always fluctuated as the boys
would leave the classroom to earn money while the girls would do domestic chores.
The nineteenth century British child was deprived of education because he or she was
“removed whenever a job of work can be found for him. . .” (Liardet qtd. by Reay 130).
This caused problems such as forgetting what he or she learnt before while few
children had more than two or three years of schooling and “in 1840 only 20% of the
youth population had any schooling at all” (Cody). In the nineteenth century, there was
a minimum number of children who went to school because they believed that
“working earned them money while school earned them nothing” (Altick 250). Out of
forty two labourers’ children under the age of fourteen who attended school, only six
could read and write, thirteen could read fluently while nine read very little and the rest
could not read at all (Reay 131). This was a survey from the Hernhill census in 1871
calculated from the School Log Book in the nineteenth century. Such statistics reveal
the level of literacy within the children of the lower class members of society who
were deprived of education due to poverty and insufficient funds to pay the school
fees.
Nevertheless, lack of education often perpetuates poverty within the circle of the
socially disadvantaged. A poor child will never live a life better than his or her parents if one
is deprived of formal education. Moreover, it is also difficult to be elevated in society if
illiterate and uneducated: “Children without proper education will dim the future of their
country. And as for children themselves, they will suffer from poverty and ill condition of the
society after they grow up without any formal education. .... without proper education, the
poor cannot change their social status and will be the less privileged group” (Jiang 21). Due to
deprivation of education, most of the socially disadvantaged people are consequently forced to
be involved in crime and prostitution as means of survival as evidenced by Oliver Twist’s
criminal friends, Fagin and his crew. “In Oliver Twist, the reproach on children’s education is
extremely apparent. Oliver, when raised by Mrs. Mann almost receives no education at all.
What he knows is only to obey “the elder lady” if Oliver hopes to escape from her cruel
‘hands and sticks’ ” (Jiang 21).
CONCLUSION
In the novels of Charles Dickens we find that he has discussed the social problems. He
seems to be one of the best critics of Victorian society. Through his novels he conveys the
message to the society that the people should not be ill-treated. The novelist, who is a great
social reformer, deals with the facts or realities of the societies. Compton points out, “He
proved to be that rare type of reformer who could moralise with smile on his lips, and mix his
sermonic powers in such excellent jam, that his contemporaries did not realize for a while that
he was doctoring their good”.
WORKS CITED
E.Jhonson: Charles Dickens – His Tragedy and Triumph volume I (1952)
Black shadow, Vincent. “A Marxist Critical Reading of Great Expectations”. The Brown No is.
10 April 2006. 20 October 2007.
Great Expectations, London: Collier – MacMillan Ltd. 1962.
Benson, John. The Working Class in Britain, 1850 – 1939. London: I.B. Tauris, 2003.
Humphrey House: The Dickens World.