Write a note on Dickens's novel

19th century novel achieves full respectability with George Eliot. Yet the master of early Victorian novelists was Charles Dickens. The success of his books depend on their quality of comedy and pathos and their attacks on public abuses. Dickens entertains everybody. His novels came out originally not in book form but in parts in an illustrated monthly magazine. They were read aloud in the family. Some of his novels were staged and were adapted to film and musical performance. His successful novels are “Pickwick Paper”, “David Copperfield”, “Bleak House”, “Our Mutual Friend”, “Great Expectations” etc. The “Pickwick Paper” is the story of an office boy who contracts to get a job as a reporter on a London daily newspaper. He travelled England by coach writing news reports to drawings and also sketches. The story is important for its comic and pathetic incidents. He was a dramatic writer. 

“David Copperfield” is his most delightful book. It is an autobiographical fairy tale. We share the view points both of child and adult. We see Dickens’s smile and pity. We experience Steerforth’s seductiveness to David. 

“Bleak House” is the best integrated book. The plot has two main lines. The chancery case of the estate of Jarndyce and Jarndyce so iong drawn out that caused absorb all the benefits and the discovery that the orphan Esther Summerson is the illegitimate child supposed dead of Lady Deadlock. The saintly Esther is to marry John Jarndyce for whom she keeps house but he releases her to marry a young doctor. Dickens created Jot of characters in this novel. The home of Esther is to set up with her doctor. The narration conveys many symbols, metaphors, fables of good and bad. We find various bleak houses in the novel. 

“Our Mutual friend” introduces three subjects in the first three chapters of the novel that is the recovery of a body from the Thames, the Veneering’s dinner party and Sylas with his wooden legs. The themes always do not hold together but Dickens’s parts are better than other writers whole. This novel important for it’s narration of every part. The wit and satire of the novel make it a Victorian novel. Dickens’s “Hard Times” is a satire on the industrial life and the government policies. 

“Great Expectations” combines narrative and analysis. It is a story with single focus of consciousness. 

“Expectations are thirst on Pip. Pip is a little boy brought up by his harsh sister who was the wife of a simple blacksmith. Pip is given money from a mysterious source. He imagines Miss Havisham to be his benefactor. Pip rises in the world turns his head. In London he embarrassed by his brother in-law Joe. Miss Havisham trained up beautiful Estella to take revenge on men. Estella chooses to marry Pip’s rival who his social superior. The story of “Great Expectations” is not only important for Pip’s great expectation but also Dickens’s style. Dickens’s simile is like Homer’s simile in the “Hiad”. 

ln a sense “Great Expectations” is a romantic autobiography. Dickens combines myth making with a world of experience. Charles Dickens is a pre-eminently the novelist of London and lower middle class people. He portrayed the life of London street and middie class people. He was a painter of London life. His novels focus the realistic picture of London life that is the social, political and the life of industrial revolution. Dickens shows man woman to be struggling together for the welfare of society. Dickens appears as a moralist as well as a social reformer. He is interested in the problem rather than the incidents. He doesn’t portray rather comic and humorous character with a touch of pathos.In fact Dickens  is not only a representative novelist of Victorian age but also a typical Victorian  novelist.