From Rogues to Riches

One of the most fascinating aspects pervading Dickens' fiction is the seamless harmony between elements of time, space, plot and meaning, and the way in which that symphony coalesces into a ringing overture of social commentary. At their most fundamental level his novels weave entertaining and immortal tales that have delighted readers for well over a century, but what has secured Dickens his place as a timeless writer is not simply his talent as a storyteller, but rather the way in which his highly moralized writing captures the essence of its age. Through his intricate matrices of plot and character development, spanning both time and space, Dickens sheds stark and often merciless light on the dark corners and fetid underbelly of life in Victorian England, and the human condition as a whole. While Dickens' immortality may stem largely from his timeless stories and clarion calls for humanistic accountability, it is owed largely to the way in which he continues to enlighten and inform the contemporary reader and English novelist as well.

Though social critique is a common thread spanning all of Dickens' works, the topicality of his commentary is by no means remained static over the course of his career. In fact, its is possible to trace the trajectory of Dickens' chief concerns and world view by analyzing the respective structures of each successive novel. Parallel to the evolution of Dickens' individual social vision runs that of the face England, and his works serve as a kind of halfway house between 18th and 20th century England, at that time a decidedly shiftless and conflicted nation.

In a kind of awkward adolescent phase, England as a nation was just beginning to come into its own as an industrial superpower at the time of Dickens' birth. He was born in the murk between the twilight of one era, in which people travelled by horse and carriage, wore handmade clothes, and clung to superstition, and the dawn of an increasingly modern one defined by capitalism, industry, railroads, and science. Considering his career in the setting of such an iconic time for the Western world, it is no wonder his work is considered so quintessential; Dickens was granted fecund topical fodder, and by meshing his skill as a storyteller with his eye for social injustice he was able to transcribe in writing the swan song of a more idealistic and sentimental era.

Consider, for instance, his earliest major work, The Pickwick Papers: The work is, at base, a set of travelling tales relating the antics of a group of aristocrats, the Pickwick Club. The novel, with its quaint preoccupation with then-antiquated aspects of society (such as travelling by coach, the swiftly-obsolescing aristocratic class embodied by the Pickwickians, and their sociological and scientific pretensions) captures the spirit of an age from which England was departing. Pickwick, with his unsubstantiated theories and pseudoscientific expostulations on diverse matters ranging from biology (his "Theory of Tittlebats"), to anthropology (his discovery of a stone bearing "a curious inscription of unquestionable antiquity") represents what Dickens perceived to be the folly of placing too much trust in any system of belief. Pickwick's discovery of the stone, which turns out to be little more than a piece of contemporary graffiti, captures the attention and great acclaim of a wide circle of scientific societies. The only dissenting voice (and incidentally the voice of reason), that of the unpopular Blotton, is quickly squelched and the offending party ejected from the club. This series of events is not merely an entertaining plot development, it is also the vehicle for Dickens' criticism of the tendency for human beings to believe too readily in the supposedly ineffable truths offered by science.

Dickens' moralized narratives rarely lend themselves to a single interpretation, however, and the device of the stone narrative, like most, is a double-edged sword. While Dickens satirizes what he perceives to be modern society's excessive confidence in the conclusions of science - which he establishes to be a fallible, human construct - he simultaneously points to modernizing England's tenacity to unsubstantiated faith. In addition to the aforementioned satirization of society's overconfidence in science, the readiness of not only the Pickwickians, but also seventeen other "scientific" societies to believe in a theory with no empirical validation is a gibe at superstition as well.

In addition to topicality The Pickwick Papers largely owes its success as a vessel for social criticism to its time-tested narrative style. Over the course of novel, an unlikely series of comical events unfolds, featuring a diverse caste of (often roguish) characters, revealing the work's picaresque roots. The picaresque, centering on the exploits of a traveler (or travelers), was a popular style in the 18th century, and for good reason; the picaresque tale is an archetypal one, in which a hero sets out on a physical journey that ultimately ends in material enrichment or spiritual enlightenment, and often both. In his essay, "Charles Dickens and Today's Reader," Dr. Joseph Gold affirms the quintessential nature of the picaresque journey, calling it a "situation so deeply rooted in the human imagination and condition that it goes back to the Odyssey, the most famous source, is peculiarly revived along with much other classical material in the eighteenth century, and persists to the present most obviously in a book like Jack Kerouac's On the Road" (Gold 206).

The picaresque is an ideal style for fiction as social commentary, as the plot unfolds in such a way that it is enmeshed with its intended moral meaning: The story is both entertaining and satisfying, as the reader is gratified by the protagonist's ultimate triumph over his travails, which suggests that perseverance in the face of adversity will always be rewarded. More than that however, the form of the narrative lends itself to the conveyance of more overarching themes, in that it causes the reader to invest personally in the protagonist, and therefore infer greater meaning from plot developments that affect that character.

Despite the aforementioned aspects of social critique, The Pickwick Papers, Dickens' earliest successful work, lacks the sense of true indignation and bite of some of his later novels. In fact, Gold attributes the novel's explosive success directly to the fact that it "is classless, that it mostly evades the ugliness of contemporary social problems, and that it seems to be almost entirely free of anger and topicality except perhaps for the brief interlude at the Fleet prison for debtors" (Gold 207). At least in this early point in his career, Dickens has yet to truly plumb the moral depths of the social injustice evident around him.

Dickens didn't remain on the sidelines for long, however; as his career evolved he rapidly revealed himself to be not only cognizant of, but also clearly passionate about societal ills, and that development helped to crystallize his literary vision of an England transfixed by the pangs of rebirth. No longer shying away from ugliness and unpleasantry, Dickens began to focus in greater depth on social issues such as the flaws in the education system, observable in his second novel, Oliver Twist. Indeed, as his career progressed his writing seemed to gain momentum in terms of their moral intensity: Two earlier works, A Christmas Carol and Dombey and Son are remarkable for their overtures on the dehumanizing effects of capitalism; Bleak House is perhaps Dickens' novel most caustically critical of corrupt human institutions; and Great Expectations, one of his later works, plainly highlights the false promises of material wealth and success.

According to Gold, it is Dickens' sense of in-betweenness, of being caught in the crux of two eras with two sets of beliefs, that contributes to the often dipolar nature of his social commentary. Gold effectively characterizes the unique setting of Dickens' career and its undeniable contribution to his writing:

"He [is the] synthesis of nineteenth-century England. He celebrates his civilized modern world, the benefits of railway travel and speed, the disappearance of a brutal lawless past, of religious fervour, of the plague, of the aristocracy, and in addition he sees all the evils and dangers of the industrial explosion, the horror of the cities, the worst aspects of the new middle class who rule England. He is in fact a radical and a conservative at the same time, wanting to preserve the best of the past, get rid of the worst of the present, and overthrow all the frozen forms and misconceptions that cause suffering" (Gold 206).

Gold has reached to the heart of what has made Dickens the unheard-of success that he became in his own era, and remains to this day. Though the memorable characters and absurd situational humor of The Pickwick Papers may have been what catapulted him to instant fame, the true value of his fiction lies in its ability the age both its darkest and brightest aspects and give them voice. His subsequent novel, Oliver Twist, did just that, bringing to light the ugliness of the Poor Laws and all the highlights of the fetid London underbelly.

Yet, despite his significant paradigm shift from anachronistic comedy into topicality and overt morality, Dickens kept selling books, and Oliver Twist is today a much more recognizable name than Pickwick. This is due largely to Dickens' skill as a storyteller and in creating sympathetic and larger-than-life characters. Moreover, Oliver Twist retains the questing feel of its predecessor; a protagonist sets off to seek his fortune and must fend for himself against a variety of rogues and obstacles until he finally attains happiness and enlightenment.

It is Dickens' evolution of the picaresque into a new kind of quest that renders his work so successful. By retaining the best aspects of a timeless genre, that of the myth of the hero's journey, and merging it with an unprecedented level of social realism, Dickens hand crafted the ideal platform for the successor to the picaresque. Indeed, this new platform serves as the launch pad for the modern novel as a form, in that it embodies the central defining theme of modern fiction: that personal narrative is the single best means for understanding reality. As Gold puts it, "it makes art out of biography, fictional or real, by attempting to see meaning and order in the events of the past and by writing about these events actually imposes order upon them and makes the story an exemplary moral odyssey" (Gold 208).

Dickens' writing, with each successive personal odyssey he wrote, from Oliver Twist, to Dombey and Son, to David Copperfield displayed an increasing understanding of the way in which people make sense of the seemingly disparate and senseless events that comprise contemporary life. As larger, more conventional belief systems, such as religion and the optimism in Imperial progress began to fade, they were gradually replaced by the sense of individual historicity that has come to define the storytelling of our own age.

Nowhere in Dickens' writing does he better capture the essence of the modern condition than in Great Expectations, his most poignant fable of personal and societal loss and redemption. The novel retains a shade of the questing feel of his earlier works, but with a key difference; as in the case of many of his mid to late novels, "the time movement has replaced the spatial" (Gold 208). In Great Expectations, the trajectory of Pip's life is a vessel for meaning, rather than those of a more finite adventure.

In this way, the novel embraces the sense of modern realism that Dickens cultivated and pioneered; as human beings travelling unilaterally through time, we are bound to the present, which gradually becomes the past. Our experiences, and the narrative they form, inform us as to the nature of the world and shape our individual identities. It is only after any event that transpires in life that we can examine it and extract meaning from it.

The structure of Dickens' narrative in Great Expectations mirrors that of real life. By affording the reader the opportunity to trace the lives of a number of characters, some of them (such as Magwitch and Miss Havisham) to the end, and by detailing the desires, failings, and revelations of each in relation to the main character, Pip, Dickens captures in a novel what it takes most people a lifetime to do: he makes sense of a life. This new kind of journey, both spatial and temporal, entailing the vicissitudes of an entire life, was the springboard for the modern novel; indeed, so archetypal is the Dickensian myth that "in the twentieth century it almost every writer's first-novel technique" (Gold 208).

In Great Expectations, Dickens found the ideal vehicle for social criticism, in that the empathy engendered in the main protagonist is unparalleled in any other narrative form. Thus, for instance, when Pip is ashamed of his common upbringings, only to discover after many years that material success doesn't bring spiritual fulfillment, the reader is all the more attentive to the underlying castigation of the dehumanizing effects of capitalism than if Dickens had written a direct treatise against it.

Essentially, it is Dickens' development and mastery of realistic social satire in the medium of the modern novel that has secured his place at the very apex of the English canon, and makes his work both enjoyable and edifying to read. The father of the modern English novel, Dickens lit the way for future generations of writers, just as he illuminated the darkness and filth of his own era through his timeless narratives, and helped to span the uncertain gap between 18th and 20th century England.

Sources:

Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. New York:

Penguin Books, 2003.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. New York:

Penguin Books, 2003.

Gold, Joseph. "Dickens and Today's Reader." The English Journal. Vol. 58, No. 2. (1969): 21 April 2008.

Schacht, Paul. Class lecture. ENGL 358: Major Authors: Charles Dickens. South Hall, SUNY Geneseo, Geneseo, NY. Spring 2008.