“He was emphatically the novelist of his age. In his pictures of contemporary life posterity will read, more clearly than in contemporary records, the character of nineteenth-century life.” (Obituary of Charles Dickens, Daily News, 10 June 1870)
As this obituary shows, even in his own day Dickens was regarded as the chronicler of his generation. His life was one of restless activity: apart from writing fiction he edited four magazines and a newspaper, travelled widely in Europe and America, acted in amateur theatricals and gave numerous public readings of his works. He took up many social causes and saw himself as a fighter against injustice and stupidity, against snobbery, and against false ideas in education and the law. His fiction is imbued with these concerns while also showing signs of his own obsessions and neuroses. He celebrated marriage and domestic harmony in his novels, yet separated from his wife Catherine after 10 children and 22 years of marriage in a curiously public fashion that cost him many friends and admirers. Preoccupation with his childhood led to the many portrayals of the vulnerability and resilience of children in his fiction, while relations with his own children, never easy, became increasingly strained as he demanded unquestioning allegiance and support. He drew idealised fictional portraits of young girls and found it hard to create credible women characters.
His great fascination with London, in his day the world’s largest and richest city, is palpable in virtually all his works, and its underworld is often the scene and focus. Dickens was obsessed with crime and punishment all his life, and our discussion of Great Expectations and other relevant texts such as Oliver Twist will show some of the ways in which this obsession shaped his writing.
