Charles Dickens, the Writer and His Work

📖 The Scoop

The Writers and their Work series contains three essays on Dickens, an account of biographical and critical studies by K.J. Fielding and appreciations of the early and the late novels by Trevor Blount and Barbara Hardy respectively. Professor Hardy's present essay, the third Writers and their Work Special, combines a biographical introduction with a complete survey of the novels, sketches, and other prose works. Dickens originally learned his craft as a journalist and the essay begins with a chapter on his first descriptions of London, Sketches by Boz: it traces the process whereby his observation of city life and social change gradually developed into an elaborate fictional technique. Of the early novels Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby are the most fully discussed, with especial attention to Dickens' insight into criminal psychology in the former.

In the later novels, beginning with Bleak House, Hardy finds a closer unity of theme and structure, the result of the firmer grasp of social criticism which Dickens displays during the 1850's and 1860's. There had been plenty of exposure of contemporary injustices and abuses in the earlier fiction, but in the later the confrontation between rich and poor has become more urgent, the comedy less carefree, the comic and serious elements more closely blended. In these later novels too, Hardy notes an effort to bring the imagination more closely to bear upon the inner life of the principal characters. Dickens does not attempt the kind of novel which is shaped by inner action as George Eliot and Henry James were to do: he keeps an external focus on society but strives within this dimension for a fuller access to the inward conflicts of characters such as Edith in Dombey and Son and Pip in Great Expectations.

Barbara Hardy (1924-2016) was Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her publications include The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form; The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel; Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel; Critical Essays on George Eliot; The Moral Art of Dickens; The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackeray; A Reading of Jane Austen; Tellers and Listeners: The Narrative Imagination; and The Advantages of Lyric, Particularities: Readings in George Eliot.

Genre: Literary Criticism / General (fancy, right?)