Give a critical estimate of Dickens as a novelist.
Ans. In the history of English fiction Dickens came in the right time. He was born in one of the stormiest years in the history of England and spent his unhappy boyhood in London, passing through experiences which were to inspire him all through his life and supplied him the raw-materials which he had worked in the series of his brilliant novels. The industrial revolution was fast changing the face of England. The discovery of the steam-engine had been potent factor in this transformation. A large number of factories had sprung up in the country. England passed from a pre-eminently agricultural country into an industrial one. The rapid growth of town life under the stress of this revolution. was the most dominating factor in the history of the early nineteenth century. The new mode of producticn brought wealth and power to the country and in the process brought about a shift in the centre of gravity in the social life. A new body of middle-class arose as a result of this and feudal England had become a thing of the past. From this class came the captains of industry, the social reformers, the great intellectuals who were pushing the old aristocracy to the background and occupied their place. They raised their voice against the evils of the feudal regime and sought to bring about a radical change in the whole social structure. Problems of education, the legal systems, the prison-system, appalling poverty of the masses, re-distribution of political power, growth of democracy stirred the consciousness of the new class. The industrial revolution had brought in its wake many new problems—the condition of factory works, exploitation of the working classes by the capitalists who reaped the entire advantage of the industrial revolution, the growth of slums in industrial campuses etc. This is the broad picture of the social milieu at the time when Dickens turned to literature. Like Tennyson in poetry, Dickens became the most representative of the Victorian novelists. He took upon himself the task of representing the thought-currents and problems of the age, with acute observation, keep sympathy and lastly with a reforming moral ardour. Since he spoke with the voice of the age, he was able to catch its ears and grip its interest. This accounts for the unbounded popularity of Dickens with his age.
The literary work of Dickens was thus-conditioned by the time and the tastes of the newly-sprung middle-class readers of the age. As a critic had put it : "Many of them had no instinctive traditions ; they were unintellectual, but not unintelligent, often close observers and shrewd judges of human 'behaviour, but without self-criticism and unable to analyse their observations. They lacked the power to discover the laws that underlay their society, but they were keenly alive to surface variations." Dickens know all this and also that his readers were eager for knowledge, were prejudiced and sentimental, had a tendency to moralising and were indifferent to the claims of art and imagination. It was for this type of readers that he wrote and naturally his works suffer from a great many limitations. He wrote novels not merely to entertain the readers but with a purpose, namely to draw their pointed attention to the evils in the various spheres of social life, and point his fingers to what he considered the probable solutions. Thus his novels are not merely transcripts of life but novels with a purpose. His vision of life is strongly coloured by his moral views. He has been rightly called the 'Professor of Humanitarianism'.
As a novelist Dickens became thus the chronicler of his own time. But the life he knew most from his personal experiences was the life of London. He was the romancer of the life of the office, workshop and streets of London. Indeed, as a story-teller of London life he has few equals. There is no better guide to early Victorian London than Dickens. His novels abound in vivid and colourful pictures of London of his own days—its squares and shops, its murky slums and prisons, its schools, law courts and churches, its neat and tiny cottages in the suburbs. Of course many other novelists of the age painted these aspects of London life. "But for the motley multitude that pour through the streets, for the hole-and-comer places of the city, for London as an incomprehensible, terrifying, delightful personality— every brick and stone alive with tragic humour—Dickens remains unrivalled."
In his artistic approach to life Dickens is a realist. He saw the life around him steadily and as a whole and took what lay nearest to his hand as the materials for his novels. He knew the life of London from his own personal experiences and direct observation and has given accurate and faithful pictures of this life in Its various aspects. He took the trivialities of everyday life, the little worries, the little pleasures, the little hardships, the little comedies, the little tragedies and irradiated them with the light of his rich humour and sympathy. Thus the life he has painted in the pages of his novels gives us an impression of reality. But realism in art does not mean a photographic impression of reality. A certain measure of imagination and hence idealism is essential in every work of art worth the name. Realism must kept within the sphere of art by presence of the ideal element, just as romance must be saved from extravagence by the dramatic truth of the events presented. This is the true meaning of realism and in this sense all pictures of life, based on reality but transformed by imagination, may be termed as realistic. It is in this sense that Dickens is a realist. Thus in David Copperfield, an autobiographical novel Dickens has told of his own life by mingling truth with fiction, with "a very complicated interweaving of truth and fiction" as he has said. Many of the incidents and characters of the novel are drawn from life but transmuted with an imagination so 'as to make them appear as ideal and imaginary'. But the world of Dickens is not merely a fantastic world but a world of men and women drawn from life, looking very much life-like and yet not of it, since they have been given a breath of Dickens' very vital imagination. As Compton-Rickett has beautifully put it: "What is our dominant feeling, after closing a book of Dickens ? We do feel that we have been living in a quaint, picturesque world, inhabited by a variety of human beings whose every detail of manner, appearance, dress is impressed on our memory. A fantastic world, a burlesque of the world we live in is our first impression perhaps; with some people it is the ultimate impression. But to others the fantasy fades from view after a while and the essential humanity and reality of the world of Dickens remains".
As a literary craftsman, Dickens has singular men s an limitations. To mention his limitations first : 'Dickens wrote rapidly. His strenuous energy was not always a substitute for careful art. His faults in taste and in style are obvious ; his literary individuality lacks polish. He sacrifices balance for the sake of intense effects ; his expression obeys monotonous habits ; he repeats himself to excess. His pathos is cheap or exaggerated ; his imagination in its continual efforts to emphasise the character of things tend rather to distort them...At every turn in his stories we come upon the favourable or unfavourable opinion of the author and these instances of bias often bore or annoy the reader" (Cazamian).
"These blemishes which the contemporaries of Dickens found it easy to tolerate, while the succeeding generations consumed them severely...are connected with sovereign gifts of an inspired artist. As a creator, Dickens is prodigious. The picture he has painted of the social world is one of the richest in the whole range of literature. His perception of things and of characters is remarkable for its direct keenness and fresh vigour ; while not unlimited in scope, it is nevertheless very wide ; coloured as it is by the writer's personality, it possesses the quality of comparable liveliness. There is nothing scientific about it, nor does it seek to be...Few are the readers wholly proof against the spell". (Cazamian)
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