Dickens as Social Reformist: Was Dickens a Reformer?

Dickens as a Social Reformist

Victorian age is very important for the English country in many ways. She saw the flourishing of industrial revolution; she saw her people engaged in mechanic development; she saw her great sons Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, J. S. Mill etc. imparting new theories to run the prospering economy of England. Moreover, the inventions in the Victorian period made the life of English people very luxurious and comforting. Some developments were meant for the people in general, while most of them were only meant to serve the ends of the rich. Railways, Electric Telegraph etc. were for the welfare of rich as well as poor. While the others like Telephone, Radio, Electricity were only for the people with good possession. Besides these, some major transformation came in existence is the field of education also. With these developments and transformations, where the English society seemed happy and satisfied, there was a class of the “have-nots” who were in search for their existence in the society growing with fast speed.

Dickens, novelist of the Victorian Period England, was highly unsatisfied with these rapid changes in the society. He did not like the interference of mechanic schedule in the life of people. He did not like the exploitation of the poor classes of the people. He did not like the child labour practice. In his novels, we can have the apparent examples of these disliking and hatred. Oliver Twist is a novel that deals with the problems of child labour. One very popular, Hard Times deals with the problems of education, utilitarianism, and unhappy marriage; it throws good light upon these problems and highlights the effects, indeed bad, that a selfish education can bring in life. Louisa does never realize what the meaning of blushing is! Tom does never know what the real education is. The Stone-Lodge represents the English Society that has become stony in the matters of heart and sentiment. Dickens did never like the society that only has the mind to think and not a heart to feel! He wanted a change; he kept trying for this to happen.

Dickens, as a child, himself has faced the situations that were not favourable. He had to face financial problems too. He had, at the soft age of 12, had to work in a shoe-blacking company. This experience, probably, made the idea of the great work Oliver Twist. Dickens says very much in the short sentence in this book, that is:

“The hardest and best-borne trials are those which are never chronicled in any earthly record, and are suffered every day!”

This simple sentence utters the numberless groans of many thousands of people who suffer the pains without any complaint or claim to be recorded! Dickens has a value and understanding for the problems of common and downtrodden.

In his great work, Hard Times, Dickens takes up the life of the poor circus persons and presents to us an ironic picture. He shows sympathy with the poor clown of the circus, Signor Jupe, who escapes from the troupe only to secure a better future to her daughter. The problems of bearing the expense of education is there reflected. Moreover, with this, Dickens adds the problem, rather a robbery that the circus troupe represents. He presents the commercialization of education, as well as he paints the commercialization of the leisure of the people. The phrase “melancholy elephants” adds to our heart a sympathy for the animals who are targeted brutally for the purpose.

Dickens, except these, takes up the problem of unhappy marriage in the Victorian society. For instance, in Hard Times, the marriage of Stephen Blackpool represents the agony of all the suffering husbands or wives. He is forced to live with or in with the fear of his drunkard wife who now and then comes to disturb his life and house. When Stephen goes for some advice from the master Bounderby, he aids to his pains only with the remark:

“Now I tell you what! (said Mr Bounderby, putting his hands in his pocket.) there is such a law…”

“But it’s not for you at all. It costs money. It costs a mint of money.”

Besides these, Dickens is undoubtedly a social reformist. He takes up the causes of the middle class people, and not as a detached novelist, but as one of those very people. To quote Cazamian, 

“No novelist before dickens has treated the lower middle classes on such broad lines or in so frank a way. He studies them not as a detached, superior kind of observer, but as one on their own level; a sympathy, an immediate community of impressions, and, as it were, an instinctive fraternity, thus impregnate his study.”

And further,

“… Such is the permanent foundation of his realism. But below it, in in the inner realms of consciousness, we feel the quivering image, the anguish of soul- debasing poverty.”

Therefore, on our own and upon the studies of these great scholars, we see that Dickens, whole his life, has devotedly worked as a writer whose works are always busy in solving or at least trying to solve the problems of the society.