Images Of Survival And Becoming In Charles Dickens’ Novels

IMAGES OF SURVIVAL AND BECOMING IN CHARLES DICKENS’ NOVELS

Table of contents

INTRODUCTION

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

Historical background

Childhood images in the Victorian period

CHILDREN IN CHARLES DICKENS’ NOVELS

David Copperfield – the child’s perspective

Oliver Twist – child labour

Great Expectations – Moral survival and personality development

IMAGES OF SURVIVAL AND BECOMING- GENERAL PHENOMENA

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

Charles Dickens is one of the foremost representatives of Victorian literature, whose work has a universal significance. Inspired largely from the sad experience of his childhood and youth, his prose has a deep by subjective, sentimental and moralistic implication. His intentions were to develop social awareness concerning violence and children.

Charles Dickens is considered to be the first novelist to give children a central role in his novels demonstrating a devotion to the neglected and abused child. He believed that children were pure and uncorrupted, that is why they are, in his novels, the ones who cast the right judgement on adults and society.

The children represent a mirror of the society contemporary to Charles Dickens, they experience poverty, orphanage, neglect and deprivation of education. They reflect Dickens’s own childhood experiences.

I chose Charles Dickens because of his concern for the poor and his discussion surrounding the condition of children. His novels are relevant to contemporary society because these unprotected, exploited members are still the most vulnerable.

Every one of Dickens’novel, contains the life experience, memories of his own world and daily notes of the author. The novels of Charles Dickens refer to the tortuous development of children, as we find in Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, the last one being an autobiographical novel about the development of the personality of young people.

My paper is focused on the theme of childhood in Charles Dickens’novels: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Each of these novels has one main child character who plays an important role in the plot and in the construction of the whole novel. The aim of my paper is to analyze these novels in the context of childhood.

I included a chapter about the historical background of Victorian England because it is important to highlight the social situation in Victorian society and, most important by its consequences for the children.

The paper consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces the historical context of Victorian England. The first chapter is called ‘The Victorian Period’ and deals with the society of the Victorian era and especially with the living and working conditions of children.

The chapter presents the Industrial Revolution and its impact on Dickens’ writings and also The Victorian society.

The second chapter ‘Children in Charles Dickens’ novels’ describe the children in Charles Dickens’ novels ( David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and Pip), the specific aspects of childhood in each novel, the development of the main protagonists, their experiences and feelings.

In the last chapter and, also, in the conclusion the descriptions of childhood in the novels selected are compared and contrasted.

With the portrayal of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Pip Pirrip and many other orphans – Dickens revealed his fight against the abuses on Victorian children.

The work of Charles Dickens reflects the worst and the best of Victorian society and it’s a complete report of the sufferings of children.

Under the pen of Dickens, the child thus grew from a passive observer of human drama into an active and creative character.

His messages about poverty and charity are still valid nowadays and we can learn from the experiences of his characters as easily as we can learn from our own experiences.

THE VICTORIAN PERIOD

Historical background

The Victorian period begins in 1837 (the year when Victoria became Queen) and ends in 1901 (the year of her death). An important aspect of this period is the expansion of British imperial power. During the 19th century, the British Empire expanded its colonial presence in many parts of Asia, Africa, in India and in the middle-east. Queen Victoria’s sixty four year reign is the longest in British history and the cultural, political, economic, industrial and scientific changes that occurred during her reign were remarkable. When Victoria ascended to the throne, Britain was essentially agrarian and rural, but by the time of her death, the country was vastly urbanized and largely industrialized.

The Industrial Revolution was a period of great changes for British society. It was also the time of great misery, exploitation and huge class differences between a very thin and very wealthy upper-class, a rising middle-class and a very impoverished working-class. (Ginger S. Frost, p.1)

During the early part of the Victorian Age only a small part of the population formed the upper-class, which consisted of aristocrats and landed gentry. The majority of the population was the working-class, whose members were working for wages and were paid weekly or monthly. (Ginger S. Frost, p.3)

Both the overall population and specific urban areas grew exponentially. The British Empire also expanded. The British ruled colonies across the globe, most notably in Canada, South Asia (India, Burma and the future Pakistan), the South Pacific (Australia and New Zealand) and Africa.

Victorian England was dominated by the effects of the Industrial Revolution, being the land of factories, warehouses and workshops. The speed of all these changes emphasized their negative aspects: unsanitary housing, children abuse, poor working conditions, low wages.

The Victorian period is divided by historians into three phases: early, middle and late. The early Victorian period includes the 1830s and 1840s, a period characterized by economic, political and social upheaval. Both industry and agriculture experienced depression in the 1840s, mostly because of an industrial downturn and the potato blight. This is the period most people associate with Victorians, represented by smokestacks, workhouses and Charles Dickens. (Ginger S. Frost, p.2)

This was also the time of the early labour movement and increasing demands for political representation, granted to most middle-class males in 1832.

The Mid-Victorian period, 1850-1875, was by contrast, a period of relative prosperity.

In this period, food prices dropped and wages increased slightly and the booms of the early industrial period settled down. Liberalism was the dominant ideology and the empire expanded robustly. In this period was the first attempt of including working men in the political sphere, starting with a reform bill in 1867.

Late-Victorian, was from 1875 to 1914. This period was one in which the liberal consensus began to break down. In the mid-1870s began a long agricultural depression and changes appeared in industry such as the decline of steel industry and the rise of new industries such as telephone, chemicals or electricity. All these led to renewed labor unrest.

The Victorian Age was a very ambiguous time with great prosperity and terrible poverty going side by side. (Selina Schuster, p.10)

The rural-urban migration caused cities to become densely populated and overcrowded in a short period of time. The results were that whole districts of greater cities deteriorated and became slums like the East End of London, which Dickens describes in his novel Oliver Twist.

During the Victorian period family was considered of extreme importance.  Women's main purpose in life was to find a husband and to manage domestic affairs; while doing so, they were completely repressed by their husbands. So, society was clearly patriarchal.  Religious faith was also extremely important; there was an exaggerated morality as well as an exaggerated adherence to form and manners.  With the Industrial Revolution coming, there was also an emergence of people into the burgeoning middle class, a class that aspired to raise itself to that of the upper class because social ranking was so important.  This admiration of a rather frivolous aristocracy is one of the attitudes that Dickens often satirizes in his works such as ‘Great Expectations’. 

Gender distinctions were also important in this period. One of the result of the Industrial Revolution was the separation of family life from work; thus, middle-class Victorians could see their homes as havens of domesticity and peace in contrast to the harsh business and political world. (Ginger S. Frost, p.3)

Victorians idealized the family; there were strict roles for husbands, wives and children. In theory, women were angels in the house, taking on nurturing duties; by contrast, men provided and protected. During this period, difficulties escalated for women because of the vision of the ideal woman shared by the society. Women could not vote and they could not become property owners. The role of women was to have children and they could not hold a professional job unless it was that of being a teacher or a domestic servant.

Education was viewed as the economic necessity of men only. The attitude towards women and education was that education need not be of the same extended, classical and commercial characteristic as that of men. Women were supposed to be educated in issues that involved domesticity. Subjects such as history, geography and general literature were important, but not Latin and Greek. Women who wanted to study law, physics, engineering or medicine were satirized and dismissed. The Victorian society deemed it unnecessary for women to attend university.

However, Victorian society appeared to be a stable society because of the lavish lifestyle of the aristocracy and the enormous profits gained by the middle class, yet the emergence of the “bourgeoisie” also meant a massive increase in poverty and urban overpopulation due to the rural – urban migration. Furthermore, women were also oppressed as they were confined to the domestic sphere and they were not welcome in the masculine public domain of politics and business. Children were also exploited as they were subjected to child labour and they worked under harsh conditions. Victorian society, particularly the middle class, upheld strong moral values and morals, yet they did little to help the poor or change their condition.

One of the worst social effects of the industrial revolution was child labour, a phenomenon that culminated during this time. The increased number of families led to the creation of the work houses and the growing population resulted in a world of children, the children of the poor who lived in the work house were expected to work by the age of six or seven, as they were useful to factory owners because they were easy to discipline, unlike adults, and they were also cheap. Therefore, in the nineteenth century the condition of poor children was to become a main area of social reform because it was a response to the fact that children were suffering and their sufferings were public (McDowall, p.120).

Thus, the living conditions of people depended on their social status. Children from poor families were not usually lucky and they could not spend their time at school, they had to work to earn money. Because of poverty, children were forced into child labour; the work of small children in poor families was needed. The poor law of 1834 provided help for them in the work houses because the small poor houses could no longer cope with the huge number of poor and unemployed (Grellet, p.106).

Childhood images in the Victorian period

During the Victorian period, children played an important role in the developing of England’s economy. They were a good source of work force. The employers hired children because they were powerless and could be paid lower wages. Education played a small role in the lives of those children. At that time there was a belief that education was not needed.

The Victorian Period was a historical time in which children often experienced violence from their families and from their teachers. Dickens' intentions were to raise social awareness concerning violence and children. He clearly shows his opinion on the matter in his novels.

In David Copperfield, violence occurs in the space of education. When David is young and is sent to Salem House for the first time he and his classmates are beaten with a cane by Mr. Creakle

‘Mr Creakle came to where I sat, and told me that if I were famous for biting, he was famous for biting, too. He then showed me the cane, and asked me what I thought of that, for a tooth? Was it a sharp tooth, hey? Didit bite? At every question he gave me a fleshy cut with it that made me writhe; so I was very soon made free of Salem House (as Steerforth said), and very soon in tears also’ (Dickens, 2004, p. 100).

The description given in David Copperfield shows the cruelty of Mr Creakle, who keeps on beating his pupils, and the hard conditions in which the students lived.

Childhood is an important topic in Dickens’ novels. In ‘Dickens and Childhood’, Allan Grant notes: ‘The child and the importance of childhood experience to later life are at the centre of Dickens’ concerns as an imaginative writer. He will continue to be read for his many other qualities as a novelist. . . . But he is uniquely celebrated as the novelist of childhood’ (A Preface to Dickens, 92).

The Victorian period distinguishes three types of classes in society. At the top of this classification was the upper class consisting of aristocrats and gentry. These were rich families who did not have to earn their living; there were a small part of society. The middle class, in contrast to the aristocrats had to work. Those families were of businessmen, doctors or office workers. The working class had the most members among the three and was also the poorest one.

Childhood in Victorian times was not different at all from childhood in our times. For wealthy children, childhood meant an overwhelming sense of boredom and a constant attempt to be proper and polite. But for poor children, life was totally different. Poor children were forced to work in the factories in order to increase the family’s income. For the family’s survival, children had to go to work at a very young age. Sometimes, they had to work as hard as their parents, side by side with adults in the coal mines.

While wealthy children were raised by a nanny, who most of time, was a substitute parent, poor children were raised by their parents, who were the guiding force in their lives.

Since poor children had to work from an early age to support their families, many parents use their children as a source of income. In those times, many parents had 10 or 12 children, for this reason.

The majority of the working class was struggling for survival. Many children were forced to walk without shoes; the older brothers had to take care of the younger ones or they had to leave to find work. For these children, it meant the end of their childhood.

In Victorian times, children had to do different types of jobs such as: chimney sweeper, factory worker, domestic servant, matchmaking, hat making, textile mill, rat catcher, pick pocket or even prostitution.

Most of them were used as cheap labour. They had to work many hours, with little breaks, often in very dangerous conditions. Despite the new law of education in 1870, a lot of children did not go to school because it meant that the family lost the money they could earn if they worked. Their parents considered school a waste of time, money and valuable labour. Thus, they lost the chance to get a better paid job when they were older. Most of them worked on farms or helped with the spinning. The lucky ones got apprenticed in a trade. There were also a lot of poor children who worked and lived in the streets. Girls as young as five went into domestic service as nurses or maids to wealthy families. The attitude towards education for boys and girls was different at that time:

‘The girls were generally supposed to be less in need of “mental cultivation” than boys, and less capable of it, and too much education was thought to ruining their prospects in the marriage market. On the other hand they were expected to have certain “accomplishments”, particularly music and drawing, and a smattering of ill-assorted, undigested general knowledge, ranging from the dates of the Kings of England to the origins of guano.’(Reader, p.121)

The development of industries and factories caused the use of children for work that adults could not do, such as sitting in coal mines to open and close the ventilation doors.

A frequent job for children in that time was chimney sweeping, a painful and dangerous job because some boys got stuck and died of suffocation. There was a job where children weren’t even necessary because it could be done by using brushes. Most of the children were orphans taken and put into slavery or underfed by their bosses so that they would be thin enough to continue going down chimneys. This job was mentioned by Charles Dickens in his novel ‘Oliver Twist’.

In factories they were used because they were cheaper than adults and could be replaced easily in case of accidents because there were plenty of children in orphanages. They also had to do dangerous work. The working conditions in the mines were difficult and sometimes deadly. The lack of light in mines caused permanent problems with eye sight. The children had to work from 12 to 18 hours a day and they often developed spine deformation due to walking stooped over constantly. Other children worked as coal bearers and carried loads of coal on their backs in huge baskets.

In textile mills, they had to clean the machines while they were kept running, thus causing accidents; many children lost their fingers or, worse, they were crushed by the machines. They had no time for relaxation. Even on Sundays, they had to clean those machines. Or in match factories they were employed to dip matches into phosphorus, a dangerous chemical that caused death by breathing it into their lungs.

It took some time before this exploitation was stopped. As time went, there were some laws such as the Mines Act, which forbade the employment of girls, girls or boys to work in mines. Sir Robert Paul or Lord Shaftesbury were some of those who fought against child labor.

By degrees, the workers united and formed trade unions and political organizations for protecting their interests. All these contributed to improving the working conditions of the working class.

The most important attempt was The Factory Act of 1833, which improved the working conditions for children and was the first step to a national educational policy for children.

Through this act, no child under nine years old could work in textile mills (except silk); it limited the number of working hours per day and required children to attend school.

CHAPTER II

CHILDREN IN CHARLES DICKENS’ NOVELS

Charles Dickens is well-known for the portrayal of children in his works. The greatest aspect of his writings is his ability to relate the experience of the child. But the most important factor that influenced his work was his childhood experiences.

The critic George Henry Lewes wrote: "Dickens once declared to me that every word said by his characters was distinctly heard by him…." (Georgiana Hogarth, 2011, p.460)

Dickens attacks harshly the distasteful experience, he himself being a victim of child labour.

Dickens’s child characters are either orphaned or their parentage is not clear. His novels are full of neglected, exploited, or abused children: the orphaned Oliver Twist, the crippled Tiny Tim, the stunted Smike, and doomed tykes like Paul Dombey and Little Nell. There are Pip (Great Expectation), Esther (Bleak House), Oliver (Oliver Twist), David (David Copperfield), Estella (Great Expectation) and Sissy Jupe (Hard Times). The children he described in his novels are vulnerable and susceptible to exploitation. He also brings to the foreground how children were deprived of education due to their social status. Jo, Pip and Oliver are abandoned children who receive no education in the early stages of their life.

Apart from the deprivation of education, Charles Dickens presents the injuries suffered at the factories and the abuse through excessive working hours with little pay. His writings, particularly Oliver Twist, attack the Poor Law Act and the workhouse system because of its harsh conditions which the children had to endure.

The first of the child-characters that Dickens introduced to readers was Oliver Twist. Through his character, Dickens purposed to awaken public conscience to its duty concerning neglected childhood.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens presented actualities instead of statistics and revealed to the public what a workhouse looked like, felt like, tasted like and smelled like. (Wilson E., p.26)

Oliver Twist evidences the typical Dickensian plot pattern which is that of myth and fairy-tale; the hero is seeking his identity by his passage through various tests; a passage through a labyrinth, the immersion or imprisonment into an alien medium, the confrontation with an evil enchanter.

But the significance of the archetypal image of the imprisoning labyrinth also has a clear social dimension. Plunged in a hostile and incomprehensible world, Oliver the outcast is either a prisoner of the workhouse or a prisoner of the underworld living in “an abyss of crime and misery” (R. Garis, p.229).

In Oliver Twist, Dickens illustrates the plight of the abandoned child, while a number of characters analogous to the orphan suggest the possible fate of Oliver.

It alludes to neglectful parents, but behind Dotheboys Hall also looms the bullying, even cruelly brutal Victorian parent, through Squeer’s insistence that his pupils will find a father in him and a mother in Mrs. Squeers.

In David Copperfield, Dickens calls attention to those who exploit the poor and the weak for material and social gain.

In his book Critical Children: The use of childhood in ten great novels Richard Locke notes:

‘Dickens uses Oliver to demonstrate that a little child shall lead us into the kingdom of heaven by the example of his being. Dickens uses David Copperfield and Pip in Great Expectations to show how powerfully the child is father of the man: a triumphant hero as a man of letters who has escaped the prison of his childhood in David Copperfield; and a sorrowful, chastened victim of childish delusions – a stoic loser in Great Expectations’.(Locke R., p.22-23)

In Great Expectations, the image of the prison plays a fundamental role in the protagonist’s evolution. Pip, the outcast orphan, is treated from his earliest childhood as if he were ‘a young offender’and this externally imposed feeling of guilt becomes superimposed on the inward guilt of having helped the convict.

Great Expectations and David Copperfield are also two novels considered semi-autobiographical; these novels are based on Dickens’s own life experiences and knowledge of people.

Great Expectations is a complex and engaging novel. Dickens uses irony to better highlight the changes that the characters experience throughout the book, mainly Pip’s transformation into adulthood and his awareness of attitudes and events by his performing either as an adult narrator, being aware of the problems once lived or as purblind focalizer, being totally unaware of his so many misinterpreted mistakes.

2.1. David Copperfield – the child’s perspective

The child hero that made Dickens famous was David Copperfield, for whom he confessed his preference in the preface of the book.

‘Of all my books, I like this the best. It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’(Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Preface)

David Copperfield is considered by many literary critics as a novel character, David’s story being related to many secondary characters which influence his development.

The lesson of David’s life is that one cannot live in dreams, particularly that of a romantic love which completely falsifying the lover’s view of his beloved, can bring only unhappiness.

The image of the child recurs in this novel. He is often treated as an object: the orphan David waiting in the coach station in London is collected like any piece of luggage: the clerk pushes David to a stranger ‘as if I were weighed, bought, delivered and paid for’ (chapter 5). David suffers deeply at the hands of the Murdstones who are exponents of the Calvinist view of children as unregenerate little puppets. The gloomy theology of Mr Murdstone considers all children to be little vipers contaminating each other. His name itself suggests the murderous effect of this ethos coupled with that of material interest, which leaves no place for delicacy, sensitiveness and affection. The ‘stone’ can also suggest the stone-hearted bearer of the name and also of the Medusa – as the effect of a grim theology.

The first part of the novel introduces the child’s point of view, David’s childhood. His ‘adventures’ are presented by David, the narrator. Later, the story of David as a boy is changed with David’s backdated commentaries.

It is Worth pointing out that they differ in some ways: “Young David’s clear-eyed but necessarily imperfect perception of what is happening alternates with the mature David´s retrospective musings in the significance of these childhood events.” (Worth, p.99).

David had little opportunity to play with children for the gloomy theology of the Murdstones made all children to be a swarm of little vipers… and held that they contaminated one another.

His happiest experiences in this regard were the memorable days he had spent at the seashore with Little Emily in the company of his old nurse. The picture of life at the Peggotty household is another of Dickens' excellent descriptions of family life among the lower middle class. Yet even into this wholesome atmosphere, the influence of the world was slowly sleeping under an insidious guise. Little Emily longed to be a lady, because then they would be gentlefolks together, Emily, uncle, Ham, and Mrs. Gummidge, and they would never more fear the sea. This apparently innocent desire for gentility later led to the most unhappy consequence

for the whole family.

After his return home, the boy became sullen, dull and dogged under inhuman treatment. His only recompense was the collection of books that opened another world to him. Dickens frequently mentions the books of his childhood and there are numerous references to them in his works. The development of his mind and imagination provided an outlet for his emotions, which might otherwise become stultified or perverted. As David said: 'They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time’.

He was sent to the new school, Salem House, during holiday time, as a punishment for his misdoing. Awaiting him was a pasteboard placard warning, announcing ‘Take care of him. He Bites.’ This was fastened to his back. The anguish that the boy suffered from this humiliation should alone have recompensed his step-father. The cruel care-taker with the wooden leg would frequently roar out, “Hallo, you sir! You Copperfield! Show that badge conspicuous, or I'll report you!’. David visualized the reaction of every boy when they spied the sign; every inanimate object seemed to jeer at him; his dreams were haunted by fantastic incidents in which the sign played a conspicious role.

The reopening of school was almost a relief, as the reality could be no worse than the anticipation. Mr. Creakle was disappointed to find that there was nothing to be reported to David's discredit. He was a cruel man who had no voice but spoke in a whisper, the exertion of which, or the consciousness of speaking in that feeble way, made his angry face much more angry. Traddles, the first boy to return, saved David much embarrassment by pointing out the placard in a joking manner. The boys were so low spirited at their return to the dismal place that they did very little teasing.

The arrival of J. Steerforth, the most prominent boy in the school, marked the beginning of better days for David, for the older lad took him under his patronage and pronounced his punishment a ‘jolly shame’. Such was the fascination that this handsome, unscrupulous youth exercised over David that years afterwards when he was proven guilty of the most heinous offences, David could not but love and forgive him.

The contempt that Dickens had for all inefficient, cruel school-masters may be summed up in David's remark about Mr. Creakle's school:

‘In a school carried on by sheer cruelty, whether it is presided over by a dunce or not, there is not likely to be much learnt. I believe our boys, were generally as ignorant a set as any schoolboys in existence; they were too much troubled and knocked about to learn; they could no more do that to advantage, than anyone can do anything to advantage in a life of constant misfortune, torment, and worry.’ (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.65)

When David went come for the holidays he found a new baby brother whom he dearly loved for his mother's sake, but the Murdstones resented even this affection.

‘In short, I was not a favorite there with anybody, not even with myself; for those who did like me could not show it, and those who did not showed it so plainly that I had a sensitive consciousness of always appearing constrained, boorish, and dull.’ (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.101)

It was a relief to leave the uncomfortable atmosphere and return even to such a desolate place as Salem House.

Scarcely two months afterwards, on David's birthday in fact, Mrs. Creakle, a quiet, brow-beaten little woman broke the news to him of his mother's death. She kept him all day and let him cry and sleep in an attempt to comfort him. He stood on a chair when he was left alone and looked in the glass to see how red his eyes were and how sorrowful his face. In all his grief he was conscious of a certain dignity attached to him, due to the fact that he was going home for a funeral, and he was aware that he was important in his grief.

‘If ever a child were stricken with sincere grief, I was. But I remember that this importance was a kind of satisfaction to me, when I walked in the playground that glanoing at me out of the windows, as they went up to their classes, I felt distinguished, and looked more melancholy, and walked slower. When school was over, and they came out and spoke to me. I felt it rather good in myself not to be proud to any of them, and to take exactly the same notice of them all, as before’. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.124-125)

For a time after the funeral David was allowed to visit the Peggotty family with his old nurse. Little Emily was growing up and seemed more capricious than before. She, poor child, had too much love and affection, and too little guidance from her uncle and cousin who were devoted slaves. David fell into a state of neglect after his return home. He was ignored, kept apart from the society of boys of his own age, denied any companionship.

‘I was not actively ill-used. I was not beaten, or starved; but the wrong that was done to me had no interval of relenting, and was done in a systematic, passionless manner. Day after day, week afterer week, month after month, I was coldly neglected.’ (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.150-151)

He could lounge about the neighborhood with the one restriction that he was to make no friends. Again it was his books that came to his assistance and comforted many a lonely hour.

Finally an arrangement was made whereby David would go to work for the firm of Murdstone and Grinby, wine merchants in the city. The ensuing scenes are those that actually ocourred in Dickens' own life, with the impecunious Mr. Micawber and his family substituted for his own.

After Mr. Micawber's release from the Marshalsea, David decided to run away from the unbearable task at the bottling factory. A dishonest young man robbed him of his box of clothing and a half-guinea so that he was forced to wander like a beggar to his great Aunt's, Miss Betsey Trotwood, home.

One of the most unfortunate incidents of that tedious, wearying journey was his experience with a drunken madman pawnbroker. The man would not give more than eighteen pence for the boy's jacket, and at that, insisted that he take something else rather than money in exchange. The poor child sat outside the shop all day waiting for his money. The neighborhood boys came to torment the old man, and incidentally David, whom they somehow connected with the establishment. The bargain was eventually closed when the half-crazed creature grudgingly paid him a halfpenny at a time.

After many futile inquiries, David at last arrived at his aunt's gate, and stood there sadly aware of his unkempt appearance.

‘My shoes were by this time in a woeful condition. The soles had shed themselves bit by bit, and the upper leathers had broken and burst until the very shape and form of shoes had departed from them. My hat (which had served me for a night-cap too,) was so crushed and bent that no old battered handleless saucepan on a dung-hill need have 'been ashamed to vie with it. My shirt and trousers, stained with heat, dew, grass, and the Kentish soil on which I had slept and torn besides, might have frightened the birds from my aunt's garden, as I stood at the gate. My hair had known no comb or brush since I left London. My face, neok and hands, from unaccustomed exposure to the air and sun, were burnt to a berry-brown. From head to foot I was powdered almost as white with chalk and dust, as if I had come out of a lime-kiln. In this plight, and with a strong consciousness of it, I waited to introduce myself to, and make my first impression on, my formidable aunt.’ (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 191-192)

In spite of his unprepossessing appearance, and his aunt's sharp tongue, Miss Betsey was kind to David, and accepted mad Mr. Dick's very sensible advice to bathe him, feed him, and put him to bed. Dickens again emphasizes the fact that a loving heart can accomplish wonders.

‘After I had said my prayers and the candle had burnt out, I remember how I still sat looking at the moonlight on the water, as if I could hope to read my fortune in it, as in a bright book; or to see my mother with her child, coming from Heaven, along that shining path, to look upon me as she had looked when I last saw her sweet face’. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.200-210)

Aunt Betsey will have a great influence in David’s new self-reliance. In response to a letter sent by Miss Betsey, Mr. and Miss Murdstone appeared at the cottage. Not discouraged by their numerous complaints against David's character and conduct, Miss Betsey settled the discussion of the boy's future by taking Mr. Dick's suggestion to have him measured for a new suit directly. She managed to give her guests the benefit of her sharp tongue before they left. It must have afforded the boy some consolation to see the brother and sister maet their match, and depart without winning that argument. At last someone took an interest in the neglected lad. Arrangements were made with Mr. Wickfield that he should attend school in town and board at his home. In farewell his aunt gave him some excellent advice: ‘Never’, said my aunt, ‘be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid these three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of you’.

Doctor Strong's school was a new experience for David. It is one of the few good schools that Dickens describes and shows what a good influence for such an institution can be when properly conducted.

‘It was very gravely and decorously ordered, and on a sound system; with an appeal, in everything, to the honor and good faith of the boys, and an avowed intention to rely on their possession of those qualities unless they proved themselves unworthy of it, which worked wonders. We all felt that we had a part in the management of the place, and in sustaining its character and dignity. Hence we soon became warmly attached to it-I am sure I did for one, and I never knew, in all my time, of any other boy being otherwise–and learnt with a good will, desiring to do it credit. We had noble games out of hours, and plenty of liberty; but even then, as I remember, we were well spoken of in the town, and rarely did any disgrace, by our appearance of manner, to the reputation of Doctor strong and Doctor Strong's boys’. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p.238-239)

The uneasiness and distrust that David's experience had bred in him, gradually disappeared under the hospitable influence of Mr. Wickfield's old house, where he boarded. The calm, bright-faced little Agnes tried to fill a woman's place in the home. David felt that there was goodness, peace and truth wherever Agnes was. David was so happy in Dr. Strong's establishment and was doing so well in his studies that he offered to teach Uriah Heep some Latin in order that he might more easily read the law books which engrossed his attention. Uriah's reply was characteristic.

‘Oh, indeed you must excuse me, Master Copperfield! I am greatly obliged, and I should like it of all things, I assure you; but I am far too humble. There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning. Learning ain't for me. A person like myself had better not aspire. If he is to get on in life, he must get on humbly, Master Copperfield’. (Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, p. 256)

School became more interesting now. Young ladies and dancing school become very boring. The head boy who had aroused such admiration in David's breast when he first went to Dr. Strong's became an advocate, but somehow much of the glamour that surrounded him in those earlier years had faded. David was head boy now, and the little lad who had been himself seemed far away. At this stage in his growth, David wore a gold watch and chain, a ring on his little finger, and a long-tailed coat and used a great deal of bear grease. Again he fell in love; this time it was the eldest Miss Larkin, a young woman of at least thirty who lived in the neighborhood. One day Agnes told him of the approaching marriage of someone he admired. Yes, it was the eldest Miss Larkin and her bridegroom was not the dashing Captain Bailey whom

he had suspeated as a rival, but that elderly gentleman, the old family friend.

For two weeks he was completely dejected. He took off his ring, wore his worst clothes, wore no bear grease, and mourned over the faded flower. This event, with the resumption of his ring and bear grease in moderation, ushered him into young manhood, his childhood far behind. It is a time when the young fellow feels as a creature of contradictions; proud of his growth, yet conscious of his size and aware of his awkwardness; the wored of childhood is closed to him, yet he is unwelcome in an adult world. His eager fancy is fickle, and he is troubled by his inconstancy.

Later, David goes to London and works as an apprentice at the firm of Spenlow and Jorkins. During his apprenticeship, David falls in love with Dora. He married her but she gets sick and unfortunately dies. The loss of Dora puts David in a great depression. He decides to leave the country and travel abroad. When he comes back home he married Agnes, his first love, who helps him very much during his studies at Spenlow's school.

2.2. Oliver Twist- child labour

Dickens’ novels, such as Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and David Copperfield, clearly illustrate the condition of the lower class, contrasted with the lavish life of the middle class and the aristocracy. Dickens uses fiction as a way of showing the darker side of human nature; his novels are not only about crime, but they also describe the Poor Law system and the living conditions of the working class.

Charles Dickens illustrates the difficult situation of the poor and their way of life in the workhouses especially in Oliver Twist.

This novel presents the real conditions of 19th century England, especially child labour and reflects on how the main characters face the problem of child labour.

Child labour at that time was synonymous to slavery. Children were subjected to inhuman torture, exploitation and even death. These child labourers were forced to work in factories and workhouses at the insistence of their parents and workhouse guardians.

Child labour, in Victorian England, was part of a horrible system which snatched children of their childhood, health and even their lives.

Poverty, however, was found to be the root cause of child labour during this period. A victim of child labour himself, Dickens criticizes the ordeal he went through. With his father’s imprisonment for debt in 1824, at the age of twelve he was sent to the „blacking‟ factory in Hungerford Market London, a warehouse for manufacturing, packaging and distributing blacking or polish for cleaning boots and shoes – in order to support his family. His early life is a current element in most of his novels. The bitter experiences of his childhood helped him to empathize with the deplorable condition of children in Victorian society.

He therefore writes: “No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I …felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance … of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that day by day, what I had learned and thought and delighted in and raised my fancy and emulation up by was passing away from me… cannot be written.”

As a child labourer, he would dine on a slice of pudding and receive for his twelve hour daily labour, a meager wage of six shillings a week.

Oliver Twist is an orphan boy who was born in a workhouse, a place associated only with suffering and starvation rather than comfort. He is an orphan child whose life depends on the mercy of the parish authorities.

In his preface to a later edition, the author explained that the book was a protest against the popular, picaresque novels that glorified crime and criminals.

‘It appeared to me that to draw a knot of such associates in crime as really did exist; to paint them in all their deformity, in all their wretchedness, in all the squalid misery of their lives, to show them as they really were, for ever skulking uneasily through the dirtiest paths of life, with the great black, ghostly gallows closing up their prospect, turn them where they might; it appeared to me that to do this would be to attempt a something which was needed, and which would B be a service to society. And I did it as best I could.’ (Charles Dickens, p. IX)

The story opens with the birth of the child in the workhouse, whither his unfortunate young mother had been taken when she was found in the streets.

‘Poor little Oliver from the moment he was enveloped in the old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service. he was badged and ticketed and fell into his place at once a parish child the orphan of a workhouse- the humble, half starved drudge-to be cuffed and buffeted through the world despised by all and pitied by none.’(Idem, p.4)

His first nine years were spent at a baby farm in company with twenty or thirty other juvenile " offenders against the poor-laws, under the care of an elderly female who made a little fortune even on the starvation rates allowed for their care. When she had managed to keep them alive on a minimum amount of food, in eight cases out of ten the child sickened and died from want and cold, fell into the fire from neglect, or was accidentally smothered. Some perverse infant, on the rare occasion of washing day, usually managed to get scalded to death. Oliver managed to survive all these dangers and lived to celebrate his ninth birthday in the cellar for daring to suggest he was hungry.

On this auspicious day the pompous Beadle, Mr. Bumble, arrived to take Oliver back to the workhouse as nine years was considered a ripe old age for a youth to become selfsupporting. There he presented the child to the board, eight or ten benevolent gentlemen, who proceeded to make Oliver feel very much at home by reminding him that he was an orphan and that he was dependent on the parish. They extended to him the privilege of picking oakum–beginning the next morning at six o'clock. These wise old members of the board decided to discourage applicants for relief, by associating it with the workhouse and gruel. After this system had been in force a few months, the paupers were suffering the tortures of slow starvation. The boys became so voracious and wild with hunger that lots were cast to decide who should approach the

master and ask for more; it fell to Oliver. He, somewhat alarmed at his own timerity, had actually said; ‘Please, sir, I want some more.’

The master was a fat, healthy man, but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the same rebel for some seoonds. and then clung for support to the corner. The assistants were paralyzed with fear.

‘What? said the master at length, in a faint voice.

Please, sir," replied Oliver. "I want some more."?’ (Dickens, op.cit., p.17)

The horror with which this announcement was received by the board resulted in the culprit's instant confinement, and the publication of a notice that the parish would pay five pounds to anyone who would take Oliver off its hands.The gentleman in the white waist coat was confirmed in his opinion that Oliver would one day be hanged. The incident was humorous; no one but Dickens could have made such a pathetic scene a subject of such mirth, and, yet, for all its exaggeration, there was truth in it-so much truth that people must have laughed very heartily indeed when they read it.

In spite of its zeal to be rid of such a desperado as Oliver, even the board was slightly reluctant to apprentice him to Mr. Gamfield, the chimney sweep, for it was a nasty occupation as Mr. Limbkins said; and another gentleman remarked that young boys had been smothered in chimneys.

That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley to make'em come down again," said Gamfield: that's all smoke and no blaze; veras smoke ain't o’ no use at all in making a boy come down, for it only sends him to sleep, and that's wot he likes. Boys is very obstinit, and very lazy, gentl'men, and there's nothink like a good hot blaze to make 'em come down with a run. It's humane too, gen'l'men, acause even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves. (Dickens, p.21-22)

Although Oliver did not hear this encouraging speech, he was terror-stricken when Mr. Bumble took him before the magistrate to sign the apprentice papers. The slight qualms of the board had been overcome by Mr. Gamfield's compromise for three-pound-ten instead of the original five pounds.

Dickens showed the attitude of the upper classes towards the sufferings of the poor by having the magistrate question the chimney sweep, to assure himself that the boy would be well treated. The rich did not wish to believe that paupers had feelings or that their lot was a hard one.

They would rather overlook such a possibility unless it confronted them as directly as did poor Oliver's horrified countenance. The poor lad's pleading for death in preference to the indenture won not only his release but even a kind word from the magistrate.

Oliver was finally sent to assist the parochial undertaker. When he was informed of this arrangement and threatened with dire punishment if he got into more trouble, the young delinquent evinced so little emotion that the unnatural wretch was considered a hardened young rascal.

‘The simple fact was, that Oliver, instead of possessing too little feeling, possessed rather too much; and was in a fair way of being reduced, for life,to a state of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill-usage he had received.’ (Dickens, p.34)

The Sowberry household welcomes the new drudge with thinly-veiled hostility as another mouth to feed.

‘I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the god had neglected. I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.’ (Dickens, p.37)

In another incident of the story, Dickens depicts in the person of Noah Claypole, the harmful effects of charity schools with their stigmatizing benevolence and the conspicious uniforms which drew down on the scholars not only the jibes of street lads, but also sticks and stones. Silently, Noah endured the bullying until he saw the chance to wreak his vengeance on his own injustice on one weaker than himself.

Oliver was the victim until Noah stepped too far. Oliver refused to endure an insult to his mother. For once Noah received his just deserts – a good thrashing. Just where Oliver acquired respect for his mother's name and memory is difficult to explain as the females whom he had thus far encountered were not likely to inspire love or reverence.

As a result of the persecution souffle in which the whole Sowerberry family engaged, Oliver was beaten and locked up until the Beadle arrived to subdue him. The terrified child managed to escape and fled to London.

Nothing is more evident of the general heartless attitude of the people at this time, against which some of Dickens's strongest thrusts are made, than the indifference and cruelty the lad encountered during his flight. Only a good-hearted turn-pike-man and a kind old lady showed him any pitty until he met the Artful Dodger, a lad of about Oliver's age in years, but sadly advanced in the ways of evil. This world-wise young fellow led the innocent hero into the infamous district of Saffron Hill, to the den of Fagin where the lad was introduced to that pleasant old gentleman's mischievous pupils and initiated into a most amusing game. It can be seen that homeless boys like Oliver could be easily enticed to become professional pick-pockets. The element of danger, the love of mischief, and an easy way of earning a little money would appeal to youths to whom the opportunity of earning an honest living was barred. In his case, Oliver had no suspicion of the nature of Fagin's business until the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates attempted to rob Mr. Brownlow. That gentleman believed in Oliver's innocence though the evidence was against him, and took the boy to his own home for medical care and attention so sorely needed. Oliver's happiness was short-lived, for Nancy and Sikes, members of Fagin's gang, discovered his whereabouts and kidnapped him as he went on an errand for Mr. Brownlow. Fagin was not merely uttering idle threats when he told Oliver that he could very easily be the

means of his falling into the hands of the law. It was Fagin's practice not only to train young thieves, but when it was convenient or expedient he betrayed them for the reward given for such thief-taking. Furthermore he regaled the boy with both humorous and exaiting stories of his own adventures. In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils.

‘Having prepared his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any soaiety to the companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would blacken it, and change its hue forever.’ (Dickens, p.178)

During the conversation between Fagin and Sikes as they planned the robbery of the Maylie home, Sikes expressed his need of a small boy and bewailed their scarcity.

‘…Lord! said Mr. Sikes, reflectively, "if I'd only got that young boy of Ned, the chimbley-sweeps! He kept him small on purpose, and let him out by the job. But the father gets lagged; and then the Juvenile Delinquent Society comes, and takes the boy away from a trade where he was earning money, teaches him to read and write, and in time makes a prentice of him. And so they go on," said Mr. Sikes, his wrath rising with the recolleation of his wrongs, "so they go on; and if they'd got money enough (which it's a Providence they haven't) we shouldn't have half-a-dozen boys left in the whole trade, in a year or two.’(Dickens, p.184)

It is doubtful if many readers felt that Sike's reproach applied to them, for they had done little to support the organization that frustrated the plans and impaired the business of such law-breakers. If Oliver did not have friends interested in him, it is doubtful if the law or anyone else would have interfered in his behalf. Although Fagin had little acquaintance with characters like Oliver, the old Jew had sufficient knowledge of human nature to realize that, while the boy had no desire to follow the life enjoyed by Jack Dawkens, Charley Bates and other adventurous spirits, his sensitive spirit would be crushed if they could once involve him in a crime. ‘Once let him feel that he is one of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief; and he is ours! Ours for his life. Oho! It couldn't have come about better.’ (Dickens, p.186)

In spite of all precautions the attempted burglary failed, and Oliver was abandoned by the housebreakers. As in his previous difficulty, Oliver received aid from the intended victims who believed in his innocence and listened to his story with sympathy.

‘It was a solemn thing, to hear, in the darkened room, the feeble voie of the sick child recounting a weary catalogue of evils and calamities which hard men had brought upon him. Oh! if when we oppress and grind our fellow creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising slowly it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in imagination, the deep testimony of dead men's voices, which no power can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and injustice, the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong, that each day's life brings with it.’ (Dickens, p.285)

Dr. Losberne experiences difficulty in convincing everyone that Oliver was not the criminal they believed him to be, and the care he had to exercise lest he fall into the hands of the law is a sad reflection on the spirit of social and civil justice that was then prevalent. Evidently a man was guilty until he was found innocent. In the light of circumstantial evidence Oliver certainly had an unfavorable reputation, for he had been a rebel, a dangerous assailant, a runaway, an inmate of a thieve's den, and an ungrateful lad who had run away from his benefactor.

The innocence and Simplicity of his character had made an impression not only on his new friends, but also on unfortunate Nancy. He had touched the only pure spark of womanliness left in the poor jaded creature who had been a victim of poverty and vice from her earliest years as she told Rose Maylie:

‘Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady," cried the girl, "that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and–and-something worse than all–as I have been from my cradle. I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my death-bed.’ (Dickens, p.395)

How frequently Dickens mentions the unhappy childhood of some character who had grown to adulthood as a menace or a burden to the very society which was so imbued with the laissez-faire policy that it permitted conditions to continue that were responsible for such ruin. In contrast to those who go bad due to their circumstances there will always be men like Monks, Oliver's half brother, who are innately bad, apparently.

He deliberately planned the downfall of the boy, out of revenge on behalf of his mother and out of pure malicious hatred, as Nancy told Rose.

‘…Monks talking on about the boy, and getting very wild, said that though he had got the young devil's money safely now, he'd rather have had it the other way; the boast of the father's will, by driving him through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit of him besides.’ (Dickens, p.396)

Noah Claypole was another dyed-in-the-wool villain, whose experience as a charity boy only intensified his meanness and cunning. After he ran away to London, he found a profitable employment through Mr. Fagin, in waylaying children and robbing them.

"The kinchins, my dear, said Fagin, is the young children that's sent on errands by their mothers, with six-pences and shillings; and the lay is just to take their money away…they've always got it ready in their hands,…then knock 'em into the kennel, and walk off very slow, as if there was nothing else the matter but a child fallen down and hurt itself. Ha! Ha!Ha! "Ha! Ha! roared Mr. Claypole, kicking up his legs in an ecstasy. "Lord, that's the very thing!’ (Dickens, p.424-425)

One of Fagin's young thieves, Charley Bates, had in his youth so imbibed the spirit of his master that he actually gloried in his calling. His professional pride was sadly jolted when the Artful Dodger fell into the hands of the law.

‘To think of Jack Dawkins, Dummy Jack, the Dodger, the Artful Dodger, going abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneezebox! I'd never thought he'd a done it under a gold watch chain, and seals, at the lowest. Oh, why didn't he rob some rich old gentleman of all his wolables, and go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour nor glory!’(Dickens, p.430)

His mournful wail is amusing until one reflects that Fagin and his kind were more zealous in instilling into their pupils such demoralizing sentiments than many schoolmasters were in inspiring noble and lofty ideals in the young minds entrusted to them. Fagin had so impressed even innocent little Oliver that when Fagin was in the cell, condemned to die, Mr. Brownlow brought Oliver to see him. For, he explained to the jailer: ‘…his success and villany, I think it as well—even at the cost of some pain and fear–that he should see him now.’(Ibid., p.532)

With the death of Fagin, and the denouement of his halfbrother's plot to disgrace him, Oliver was freed from the evils that surrounded him. Secure in the care of Mr. Brownlow who adopted him, he enjoyed the happiness that Dickens so firmly believed to be the prerogative of every child.

The first section of the novel is a scathing denunciation of an inhuman social reality, the workhouse system that exercised so much cruelty and inflicted so much suffering on the anonymous poor Dickens’ s heavy use of irony makes his satire strike home.

Dickens recurrently emphasises the dream-like quality of Oliver’s experiences and he likewise insists on the boy’s actual dreams and half-waking visions (chapters 2, 30, 34, 49, 51). In the end, his progress from the workhouse, ‘the dreary prison of his youthful days’ to the secure position he finally reaches, seems ‘a happy dream’ with the events arranged ‘as if by magic’ (chapter 51).

The inhumanity of the system is apparent from the very beginning as Oliver is not only starved but treated as an object, a potential tool: ‘The next morning, the public were once more informed that Oliver Twist was again to let; and that five pounds would be paid to anybody who would take possession of him’ (chapter 3). Similarly, when Bill Sikes is about to prepare his burglaring equipment, he lets Fagin know that he has everything but ‘a centre-bit and a boy’ (chapter 19), a statement which shows that Sikes makes no discrimination between a human being and an inanimate implement.

The moral aim and allegorical intention is plainly professed by Dickens himself in his Preface (‘I wished to show in little Oliver the principle of Good surviving through every adverse circumstance and triumphing at last’) which he adds to that of ‘the stern truth manifest in his depiction of the miserable reality of workhouse conditions and of thieves’ life (naturally omitting the sex-drenched atmosphere, because the Victorian tabu over such matters).

The archetypal mages of paradise and hell have undergone an evident lay transformation as they seem conceived first and foremost in social terms: the hell of the workhouse within accepted society and the bell of the criminal London underworld steeped in vice and corruption outside society but forming a little independent ‘community’ (chapter 43). The workhouse period of Oliver’s life, his short apprenticeship and his life in the thieves’ dens are a long series of scenes of confinement, beating and starvation, associated with images of darkness, a stuffy oppressive airlessness and filthy decaying houses among, which reign Fagin, who shares with Monks the archetype of the devil.

Likewise, the image of paradise is the middle class dream of a quietly living ‘little society’ (chapter 53) of well-off people based on love, friendship and kindness to the less fortunate.

The shining presence in this milieu is Rose, patterned on the archetype of the Angel, who is always associated with images of flowers, fresh air and music.

Dickens uses animal imagery in order to illustrate poverty and starvation in Victorian times.

In the first part of the novel, Oliver has much in common with a starving animal. He greedily and wildly rushes upon the food that Mr Sowersberry’s dog has neglected: he tears the bits asunder ‘with horrible avidity and all the ferocity of famine’ (chapter 4). Two chapters later, the parallelism becomes even clearer as Oliver is compared to a hungry pig. Later, when Oliver turns more and more into the embodiment of indestructible virtue, losing his actuality of a starving boy, he is more conventionally compared with a lamb, the Christian emblem of sweet meekness (chapter 20). Yet, for the thieves and the profligate Monks, who cannot conceive humanity other than in animal terms, he is ‘a young dog’ (chapter 21) or a ‘two-legged spaniel’ (chapter 40).

Poverty and starvation turn human beings into mere animals, as in the description of the paupers’ house and family, where Mr Sowerberry is summoned in his capacity of an undertaker: ‘The kennel was stagnant and filthy: the very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness were hideous with famine…The people inside seemed to Oliver so like the rats he had seen outside’ (chapter 5).

The poverty-stricken, filthy interiors that are obsessively recurrent in the novel, are actually ridden with rats, mice, spiders, worms, snails and slugs.

Throughout his life, Dickens strove to arouse the public to an awareness of the fact that crime was the result of the terrible poverty and ignorance in which the Victorian society kept its lower classes. He worked harder in order to to stir society’s compassion and thus bring about a relief from poverty and ignorance.

But with some few exceptions, he didn’t wish to rouse society’s sympathy for the criminals whom he saw as the results of these evils. His concern was for justice, for he states in the Preface to the novel Oliver Twist that ‘there are in the world some insensible and callous natures, that do become utterly and incurably bad.’ Thus, there is a link between the social corrupting causes of crime and the absolutely evil nature of most Dickensian criminals.

Oliver acts as a bridge, and through him Dickens rouses, in the first part of the novel, the readers’ hatred of a system which cruelly exploits poverty and ignorance and, in the second part of the novel, the readers’ fear of those who fight that system by means of the evil, violence and brutality within themselves – the criminal gang. (Wilson, 1972, p.131).

All the descriptions of the places in the unsanitary London of the 1830s in which the thieves evolve, are recurrent pictures of dirt, rottenness, decomposition and decay given in vivid concrete detail, expressing a strong social criticism and indictment. The thieves’ houses have more in common with the street than with a home, the streets represent hell while the home represents heaven (that is a concentration of all good), being the central images at the heart of a novel whose central theme is the fate of the homeless.

But, however dirty and squalid Fagin’s den is for Oliver, it still provides a home-like shelter to him, it is more comfortable than sheer exposure to the elements and starvation in the streets.

The opposite of the dirty and rot-ridden underworld dens is represented by the image of Mr Brownlow’s neat and tidy house and that of the Maylies’ country house. In the case of the latter the swarming agitation of the city, the suffocating smelly closeness of the London streets and the more so of interiors, have here been replaced by calm, openness of perspective and fresh air:

Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods, of an inland village!…Oliver, whose days had been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there. The rose and honey-suckle clung to the cottage walls; the ivy crept round the trunks of trees; and the garden-flowers perfumed the air with delicious odours.(chapter 32).

In the universe of Oliver Twist, the yearning to be comfortably secure is a product of fear, the fear of corruption and of poverty. And the fear is genuine, and perfectly communicated by the rhetoric of the narrative discourse, which explains the universal appeal of this work.

The polarities of darkness and light, violence and tranquility, poverty and wealth masterfully articulate the Victorian fear of poverty and loss of identity as well as a beautiful parable of the human soul (and since Oliver is ‘triumphant virtue’, a morality play character, it is besides the point to complain that his speech is not that of a workhouse boy).

If ‘Heaven is a long way’, as Oliver says, there are kind-hearted people on earth and although their presence is not as concretely felt as that of the wicked Fagin or Sikes, by means of the elaborate machinery of the plot Dickens contrives, they bring about the happy ending.

2.3. Great Expectations- Moral survival and personality development

Great Expectations presents the story of the orphan Pip, his life from childhood to manhood. In this novel, Pip, the main character, goes trough a series of painful experiences that force him to develop as an adult and to suffer the consequences.

His life is described in nineteen chapters in each part, which correspond to the phases of his childhood, his youth, and his maturity, according to Nicola Bradbury (Bradbury, 2001, p.163)

The first part, containing the first nineteen chapters, concerns Pip’s world as a child, expressing all the problems and feelings of his childhood, Pip’s meeting with the convict and his introduction to Miss Havisham and Estella.

While Pip was experiencing different standards of living, his expectations increased. Pip's experiences lead to a inappropriate behaviour and makes him forget the value of true friendship.

His misfortunes allow him to become fully aware of his wrong doings and to evolve from selfishness to selflessness.

Throughout the novel, Pip develops and matures from a naïve, young boy to a moral gentleman by three main stages that take place during his life.

In the first stage of his life, Pip is young and wants to impress Estella, but he doesn’t know what it means to be a gentleman. Basically, the first stage is about the three wishes that Pip asks for: education, manners and social growth. These three wishes come from Pip's desire to make himself worthy of Estella, who belongs to a higher social class and plays an important role in this first stage. ‘The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and she's more beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want to be a gentleman on her account’ (129).

Pip doesn’t want to be a humble blacksmith like Joe.  He wants to be intelligent, to be considered a person of high importance.  That is why, at the end of this stage he moves to London and begins to see the things differently.

In the second stage, Pip is able to live his dream of being educated and wealthy. As the second stage evolves, he has less and less time for other people outside of his little circle; he mistreats Joe and Biddy, finding it an embarrassment to be around them. His relationship with Estella also gets worse. They hadn’t seen each other for years and the small bond that they had is broken with time. Estella married Drummle, so Pip and all his hopes for her are lost as well.

Pip begins to spend too much money and gets into debt. Once Pip discovers who is his true benefactor, all his dreams are smashed. He simply can't believe that a criminal had been supplying him with money all this time. The second stage ends with Pip being lost and destroyed by all the problems he faces.

In the third stage, Pip tries to improve all his relationships with people he mistreated and loved by finding a good job for Herbert or helping Magwitch to escape.

He returns home, where meets Little Pip, the symbol of rebirth. Pip resolves all his problems and decides to live with the people he loved the most: Joe and Biddy, his family.

Therefore, Pip evolves from a boy who didn't truly understand the burden of being wealthy to a young gentleman living with his family.

Dickens’s Great Expectations stands out as, on the one hand ‘the most drastic expression of his criticism of the Victorian ideal of success’( C.A. Bodelsen, 1959), and, on the other hand as ‘the most completely unified work of art that Dickens ever produced.’(Angus Wilson, p.169)

Dickens’s criticism of a pecuniary society is symbolized in Pip’s dream of becoming a gentleman living in decorative grandeur, on money he has done nothing to earn, supported entirely by the labors of others. It was the dream of nineteenth century society, inclines to base its hopes of comfort and ostentation on the toil of the labouring classes.

Pip’s ‘great expectations’ were the great expectations of Victorian society’s vision of a parasitic opulence of future wealth and glory.

On the personal plane, the major theme of the novel is guilt, ‘guilt imposed, guilt assumed, guilt transcended’(R. Barnard, op.cit., p.106) and the means of transcending it, which is love.

It is natural Pip should feel guilty when stealing his sister’s larder in order to help an escaped convict but the intensity of his guilt seems disproportionate.

His sister seems possessed of no affection for him and treats him as if he were an addicted delinquent.

Whenever she has an audience she dwells on ‘all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts of sleeplesness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I had contumaciously refused to go there’(chapter 4).

The feeling of guilt is externally enforced upon the poor orphan but it is also internally increased by his actual guilt of stealing his sister’s larder, a secret he never lets out, either in his childhood or later. In Pip’s case, his guilty feeling is clearly the result of the way he is treated.

The recurrent images that symbolically remind him of his guilt are the file and the leg iron. Pip’s feeling of guilt is so intense that he is haunted by the idea that in some way he was responsible for the attack of his sister, a feeling which is intensified when the weapon is found to have been a convict’s leg iron, the other symbol of Pip’s criminal convention with Magwitch. Later on when he goes to London by coach as a travelling companion and is seized with an apprehension which gradually turns into undefined dread (chapter 28).

In Great Expectations, the prison image plays a fundamental role in Pip’s evolution. Pip, the outcast orphan, is treated from his earliest childhood as if he were ‘ a young offender’ and this externally imposed feeling of guilt becomes super-imposed on the inward guilt of having helped the convict.

The second contact of extreme importance for course of Pip’s life is his encounter with a self-willed prisoner, Miss Havisham. Though strongly reminiscent of the self-immolated Mrs. Clennam, her significance is wider: on the one hand, she embodies ‘man’s propensity to cherish his emotional wounds, distort them to mere theatricality, use them as an excuse to pervert others’( R. Barnard, p.109), and on the other hand, she becomes a symbol of the possessiveness of the surfeited upper classes. Her moral disintegration is suggested by the symbolic images of decomposition, rot, vermin and dust, with which her house is associated and which point to the great archetype of chaos. This picture exposes in concrete form the essence of the upper class which Pip has come to covet, under the influence of Estella’s opinion of him; it symbolically shows that the gentleman’s position, that Pip desires is nothing but a decaying prison. When he is a gentleman in the making in London, Pip becomes a prisoner of his own snobbishness, a prisoner of convention and, like Merdle, he is afraid of his own servant.

The sense of having been trapped and imprisoned in a given situation is extremely strong with Pip, who frequently feels caged and threatened. Pip tries to ignore it but never escapes his connection with it. This is suggested by his sense of identification with the convict: the bread and butter he puts away surreptitiously becomes ‘a load on my leg’ and thus ‘made me think…of the man with the load on his leg ‘ and a little later in the morning the cold earth rivets itself to Pip’s feet ‘as the iron was riveted to the leg of the man.

Symbolically related to the prison image is that of the trap which recurs insistently enough to convey a vision of society as a dangerous place for the unwary individual. Thus the convicts the police are trying to recapture are presented as ‘game trapped in a circle’. Life for Magwitch and his kind is to try to avoid the multitude of traps since surrounding them: ‘I’m an old bird now, as has dared all manner of traps first he was fledged’.

Pip’s evolution is described as a progress from one trap to another, Jaggers is likened to a man who sets a trap and ‘suddenly-click-you’re caught’ and Pip does fall prey to his non-commital way of speaking. Estella, too, is intent on ‘entrapping men’. But Pip’s illusions about Estella and Miss Havisham’s secret intentions are mostly the creation of his own imagination.

‘You made your own snares’, the old woman clearly states. Orlick also sets Pip ‘a trap’ which he almost falls into for good. The hero’s fear of being trapped by external forces into a rigid confinement, of having his will annihilated, is hauntingly expressed by the nightmares caused by Pip’s fever, after Magwich’s death.

He dreams that ‘I was a brick in a house wall, and yet entreating to be released from the giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beem of a vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored in my own person to have the engine stopped and my part in it hammered off’.

Such images stir deep vibrations in the human heart, they embody the fundamental fear of violation of one’s personality, of being destroyed as a human being and turned into a mere wheel in a mechanism, a fear previously expressed in Esther Summerson’s nightmare that ‘strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads!’.

Pip’s dreams betray his terror of being used, manipulated by others like an unfeeling object, of being turned into a powerless thing in a mechanical universe, of being imprisoned ina hopeless situation, as he has discovered he was actually used by Miss Havisham as ‘a model with a mechanical heart to practise on when no other practice was at band’.

The confusion of Pip’s mind and his belief in his fortune of ‘great expectations’as either bestowed upon him from above, for his real but unseen qualities or granted to him for faithful service (Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs Joe having extensively dwelt on this possibility contributed to his self-delusion) is reflected by an internalized form of the labyrinth: his desire to get Estella is, he says, ‘the clue by which I am to be followed into my poor labyrinth’.

A first step in shaping Pip’s destiny is his gratuitous act of kindness to the convict. By bringing the instrument with which Magwitch is able to file off his leg-iron, Pip seems to have bound it on his own leg. It is the act that completes his alienation from a hostile environment, as his guilty secret separates Pip from Joe, his only friend and protector. Thus the characters in this novel are connected by chains of guilt, corruption and regeneration, in which each character can be seen to be playing an ambivalent role: Miss Havisham, who, in order to take revenge upon Magwitch’s partner, corrupts Estella and Pip (Magwitch’s real daughter and his son) is redeemed in the end by her own suffering and Pip’s forgiving pity.

Pip’s pity for Magwitch causes the beginning of a process of regeneration in a convict who first materially helps the spread of corruption in Pip and then starts inducing a process of regeneration.

In Great Expectations, the symbol of man’s destiny is illustrated through the recurrence of the image of destiny as a chain.

The image of the destiny chain recurs when Pip grasps the imprisoning situation the convict’s revelation has put him into: ‘What I was chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me’.

The whole plot of the novel and the rich set of analogous and contrastive characters build up a complex vision of the moral universe whereby Dickens shows that good and evil, what we most desire and what we most hate are inextricably intertwined.

Pip’s initiation to the cult of the heart by undergoing the test of immersion in water and the fire test of his fever revives the rebirth archetype which is also corroborated by the final image of vegetal revival: ‘some of the old ivy had struck root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin’ (chapter 59). Pip has been in the paradise of his ‘great expectations’, has lost his innocence by his plunge into the sea of experience and has eaten from the fruit of knowledge and finds himself again in the forsaken garden that was his initial paradise, which now assumes the significance of an earthly Paradise where Pip is left to achieve, in subdued notes, his mid-Victorian ideal of domestic felicity.

CHAPTER III

IMAGES OF SURVIVAL AND BECOMING – GENERAL PHENOMENA

Charles Dickens’ work presents a large variety of aspects characteristic for the society of his time. No artist has given readers a truer and more complex picture of his epoch: faithfully documentary, yet generously inspiriting and poetic, poetic in the sense of perceptive and suggestive.

The ideal world for Dickens remained that of pre-industrial 18th century England, the England of coaches, high-roads and inns, of small craftsmen, patriarchal family ties and convivial Christmas festivities.

According to Peter Golban, from the most important aspects of the human experience displayed by the protagonist, Dickens pays a particular attention to a child's psychology, for example, Pip and David Copperfield, do not know their father. They come into conflict with the world's cruelty and this situation means nothing else than loss of faith in the values of home and family, and inevitably leads to the search for a replacement, both as an individual and as a philosophy of existence, the young protagonists being forced to create their own way through the darkness of experience.

London seems to be such a replacement, the city playing an important role: as a source of release or of total corruption, a citadel of the world and a protest of civilization against barbarity.

For Dickens, these characters are blessed creatures because they remained eternally in a childhood paradise. After all, in Dickens’ work, childhood is the true paradise.

Oliver Twist opens a series of novels showing in sombre colours the new aspect of the bourgeois world; it shows up the new forms of exploitation proper to that period of capitalist expansion.

Prompted by the great Chartist crisis, Dickens dwells on a problem of great topicality at that particular moment, the problem of workhouses. The industrial bourgeoisie was interested in securing the largest number of hands at the lowest posible prices.

The situation of the paupers was now considered. All along the 18th century, the paupers had been in charge of the village or town parishes, therefore of private charity. This vestige of feudal organisation which – according to the new conceptions – was encouraging paupers to sloth and was keeping them away from the factory, had to be eradicated. The new workhouses are therefore built in every parish, wherein – according to the report of the commission on workhouses: ‘Those sheltered should be subjected to a regime of work, to a discipline and prohibitive measures such as the inconveniences should surpass the advantages’.

The paupers were subjected to a barbarous regime of 14 hours work daily; man and wife were separated and so were parents from children.

‘…an ideal workhouse’- Marx says ironically quoting the opinions of a contemporary economist, – ‘such a workhouse must be turned into a house of terror’. Later ‘the house of terror for the paupers which in 1770 the soul of capital could only dream of, rises a few years later as a gigantic workhouse for the workers of the manufactories themselves. Its name is the factory. This time the ideal becomes pale when compared to reality’.

The growth of industrial capitalism evolved in a system of factory laws, an industrial legislation whose most revolting aspect, child labour, Marx repeatedly denounces.

‘It is worth the public consideration’, the economist says, ‘whether a workshop which for its smooth running has to steal pauper children from their cottages and from workhouses making them labour most of the night and thus losing their time for rest, might contribute to the national and individual happiness’. (G.K. Chesterton)

It is also worth recalling that the 1819 Factory Act establishes 12 hours daily work for children under nine years of age.

Such being the situation, Dickens proceeds to show, in Oliver Twist, the full horror of these workhouses, and since the victims concerned are children, his denunciation of it is particularly moving.

The novel is the first to tackle the miserable slums, which is new upon the social as well as upon the literary arena.

In Oliver Twist and in David Copperfield, as well as in most of his novels, Dickens voices his indignation against a social system which does not only allow but fosters abuses; he voices his pity for the small victims of tyranny, injustice and deprivation and launches an appeal for greater justice and humanity.

Truthfulness in character – presentation and details is his hallmark and his final words denounce the survival, in mid-nineteenth century, of unbelievable haunts of misery and degradation.

In Oliver Twist the workhouse looms large and ominous. A young woman is found one night lying in a state of exhaustion on the steps of the workhouse. On being taken in, she gives birth over night to a puny male child and dies soon after. According to the practice of the workhouse where foundlings are named in alphabetical order, the child is registered as Oliver Twist, the name signifying the original twist impressed upon Oliver’s character by the unfortunate circumstances of his birth and early surroundings. Oliver is then sent out to the so-called workhouse nursery where children grow like weeds, unwashed, unfed and frequently beaten.

At the age of nine he is brought back into the workhouse and joins the other children in the daily routine of hard work, violence and starvation. The feeble Oliver now ‘desperate with hunger’ and ‘reckless with misery’ stands up and pronounces his epoch-making claim for more food.

Because of that, Oliver, now considered a wild, rebellious character, is first incarcerated, then confronted with the dignified board of directors. Oliver steps out of the workhouse into another and larger place of opression, fear and starvation – the parish. The horror culminates in the miserable parish with the burial scene. The proceedings are hurried through because this is a parish-burial and there is no money in it. Yet, for the same reason, the clergyman makes no haste to come, and so the mourners have to stand in the cold, drizzling rain, in the damp clay, by the brick of a parish grave, with the parish children noisily playing, jumping backwards and forwards over the coffin, without the least concern for the solemnity of death.

Eventually Oliver leaves behind the world of the parish to seek a larger place of oppression and exploitation, a workhouse in disguise – London. This is the place where the oppressed have become oppressors or criminals or victims. Oliver falls into the hands of vagabonds, thieves and evil-doers and there is every likelihood that he will assume the likeness or become the victim of his company.

Oliver is finally rescued from his troubles by kindly Mr. Brownlow and wakes up among decent, benevolent middle-class people who will take care of him. He is again kidnapped by a gang of thieves and again finds a peaceful shelter in the Maylie household, where he is kindly brought up.

Dickens wishes Oliver’s experience to appear ‘a long troubled dream’. He wishes to contrast the existence and the relations of two worlds: on the one hand the underworld of the workhouse, of the parish funerals and of the thieves’ den; on the other hand the comfortable life of respectable middle-class people. He wishes to stress the hopefulness and the promise by a picture of antagonistic elements of darkness and light.

In his novel David Copperfield, Dickens attempts to express the common themes that occur during the Victorian era. Therefore, David Copperfield is an important tool that Dickens used to convey his message about such a social phenomenon. In the meantime, some critics argued that this novel is his best one depicting the oppression of children.

David Copperfield is central to Dickens’s career in more than simply the chronological sense; its evocation of suffering derives directly from the novelist’s acute awareness of his own childhood reverses, but its wit, its detailed observation, and its description of the slow ‘disciplining’ of the heart give it a confident vitality and a progressive optimism which allow for the transmutation of tragedy.

The image of the child in David Copperfield is presented differently because of the quality of this autobiographical novel. Reading passages of Mr. Micowber’s imprisonment at Kimpe's Bench Prison, followed by wife and children, we realize that Dickens remembers his father’s imprisonment in the Marshalsea prison. Many critics have claimed that David Copperfield is Dickens's alter ego, because even in the preface to "David Copperfield," the writer himself testified that he has a child in his soul, and his name is David Copperfield.

David Copperfield is an orphan boy who spends some happy days with his mother and under the care of his nurse Peggotty, but David’s happiness ends when his mother married the cruel man Mr. Murdstone who brings his sister Jane Murdstone to live with them in the house. During this time, David is treated harshly by the Murdstones .

The story of David’s suffering begins with the day and hours of his birth; he was born on Friday at night and it is considered by the women of the village that he would be unlucky in life:

‘In consideration to the day and hours of my birth, it was declared by the nurse and by some sage women in the neighborhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted first that I was destined to be unlucky in life.’ (David Copperfield Ch I, p.3).

Thus, he will face many obstacles and difficulties that will affect his happiness and make him suffer in his life.

As a result to his misbehavior with his stepfather, David was imprisoned for five days, and sees no one but only Miss Murdstone who brings to him bread, meat and milk.

‘The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to anyone .they occupy the place of years in my remembrance .The way in which I listened to all the incidents of the house that made themselves audible to me, the ringing of bells, the opening and shutting of doors, the murmuring of voices, the uncertain pace of hours, especially at night, when I would wake thinking it was morning, and find that the family were not yet gone to bed, and that all the length of night had yet to come – the depressed dreams and nightmares I had –the return of day, noon, afternoon, evening, when the boys played in the churchyard, and watched them from a distance within the room, being ashamed to show myself at the window lest they should know I was a prisoner.’(David Copperfield Ch IV, p. 51).

By describing his nostalgia for playing with the boys it becames clear that it is so cruel and unjust to isolate a child.

After the death of his mother, he was removed from school and sent by Mr. Murdstone to work in a blacking factory in London at the age of ten. So, David describes the nature of his suffering, that he is thrown away at a very early age, being surprised by this action; he didn’t think that Mr. Murdstone could do something like that by sending him to work.

‘I know enough of the world now ,to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything ; but it is matter of some surprise to me ,even now , that I can have been so easily thrown away at such an age, a child of excellent abilities, and with strong powers of observation, quick, eager, delicate and soon hurt bodily or mentally, it seems wonderful to me that nobody should have made any sign in my behalf. But none was made; and I became,at ten years old, a little labouring hind in the service of Murdstone and Grinby (David Copperfield, Ch XI, p. 130).

David faced a different social suffering throughout the novel, beginning with his condition as an orphan boy, suffering at school and, in the end, the quest for happiness and independence. After all this pain and suffering, David found his happiness and independence.

In his late works, Dickens intensifies his ‘particular relation’ between himself and his public.

Pip in ‘Great Expectation’ is manipulated and gentrified and left empty; this novel uses a confessional, first-person narrator, but Pip is of a lower social class than David Copperfield and lacks his ebullience and resilience and his final reward consists merely of a muted semi-fulfilment.

The story of Pip differs from those of Dickens' others novels in that it is a study of character as it develops through the influence of circumstances and surroundings. Pip is not a heroic figure; in fact most of his actions are meant to show that he is not.

Pip's great expectations really began when he was hired to amuse Miss Havisham, a wealthy recluse. There was always the possibility that this eccentric creature might take a fancy to him and make his fortune. After meeting the haughty girl Estella who called him a common laboring boy, and who disdained his coarse hands and thick 'boots, Pip began to feel dissatisfied with his lot.

In Miss Havisham, Dickens has presented a frustrated woman who reared a little girl to be proud and cruel and heartless in the unwholesome atmosphere of her ghastly house, in order that her own deserti on at the altar might be avenged. Estella had no true conception of the worthwhile things of life; she was not to be a woman but an instrument of revenge.

The dread of not being understood kept Pip from telling the truth about Miss Havisham's fantastic establishment, and because Uncle Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe were so rude to him, Pip invented a marvellous description.

He was honest enough this time to confess his guilt to Joe and admit that he felt miserable because beautiful Estella called him "common". Joe warned him against lying, …’If you can'tcget to be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to it through going crooked. So don't tell no more on fem, Pip, and live well, and die happy’.

Pip's childhood was fast drawing to a close with the days that intervened before his departure to the city. His joy at the prospect dawning before him was somewhat marred by his dissatisfaction with himself.

Whenever he caught Joe or Biddy covertly looking at him he felt offended, as if they were expressing mistrust of him. As he took a farewell trip through the neighborhood, he promised himself that he would do something for the townspeople one of these days, and ‘formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension upon everybody in the village’.

Of all Dickens' child characters, Pip is the most unusual. His struggle is with himself and the little narrow world that surrounds him.

Through all his fortunes and misfortunes it is crude, simple, Joe Gargaery, symbolizing the quiet, humble, happy aspects of a simple life, who is contrasted with that of capricious Estella, who stands for the world of "fine gentlemen." Joe seemed to bring out all that was best in Pip, Estella drew only on his weaknesses.

Thus Dickens seems to be showing what a powerful influence good or evil characters can be, and emphasizing the responsibility of individuals in a society for the common welfare. Pip makes a pathetic figure, though a foolish one, and Dickens presents him with skill and dexterity.

For a time good fortune turned the head of Joe's little friend, but in the end, when Pip was faced with a difficult situation, his better nature asserted itself and he was generously able to give the happiness that he deserved to the convict who had risked all to make Pip a gentleman. Pip realized at last the dignity of labor, and the beauty of a staunch and noble character.

Dickens' minor child characters reveal his moral purpose as clearly as do those who have major roles in his stories. Suffering childhood in every guise won his sympathy and he was eager to spread his gospel of humanitarianism in their behalf. His most effective attacks on the political, economic and social evils of his day were presented with children as the victims.

One after another the child characters in Dickens' novels play their part in depicting the author's sentiments in regard to the political, social, and economic evils of the time as they appeared to him. Beneath the humor and drama of his stories runs an undercurrent of moral rejuvenation that cannot fail to impress the thoughtful reader, and which answered a great need of the Victorian Era.

The circumstances of Dickens’s boyhood, the poverty, the struggle for a livelihood, the association with all and sundry in the lower and middling classes, had effects upon his mind and character which lasted to the end. (Ernest A. Baker, p.237)

In David Copperfield, records the neglect and indifference undergone at the hands of his own people, the responsibility being transferred, however, to an imaginary stepfather: the inadequate spell of schooling, the heart-breaking experiences at the blacking warehouse, very slightly disguised, the wanderings in the London streets, the keen-eyed observation, the companionship with unsavoury characters.

David, like Dickens, was ten years old when he escaped from the warehouse and was put to school. The dread that he might grow up ignorant and unfit for a decent manhood, the anxiety about his education which troubled David, as much as his physical sufferings, no doubt afflicted Dickens, too.

Dickens went through the same miseries and agonies, as David, without being demoralized or embittered. He knew from experience what it was like to be a waif in London. Well for the happiness of the world at large that he went through all that, though at what cost to his own happiness! For David would fain have blotted it all out.

‘No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.’(David Copperfield, XV)

David Copperfield is a tale of ups and downs, joys and sorrows, but the prevailing tone is one of cheerfulness and confidence in the essential goodness of life. Dickens had some inkling of the great truth that virtue is its own reward, and ought to be a sufficient reward; or else he would not have been so simple and yet so moving in the speech put in the mouth of Betsy Trotwood: ‘Never’ said my aunt ‘be mean in anything, never be false, never be cruel. Avoid those three vice, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of you.’

In Great Expectations, the freshness and spontaneity of his previous autobiographical novel came to life again.

The earlier autobiography David Copperfield, had been a straightforward history of childhood and young manhood, with a plot loosely tacked on. This time the plot is fundamental.

Great Expectations is a novel of adventure, the sort of adventure that might well happen to a person who got himself mixed up with questionable characters, in such a spot as this, close to the convict-ships, or in what really were in those days the wilds of London. Pip has narrow escapes and goes through many racking experiences; he has to be prepared for facts of violence, and before the end his manhood is put to the test in a way unusual in a novel by Dickens. Pip grows, changes and develops, which cannot be said without many qualifications of any single one in the previous novels.

True, David Copperfield also grew up, and learned from experience how to face a complicated world. But in David Copperfield, it was a sensitive boy’s impressions of a crowd of extraordinary fellow-beings that were so absorbing; David himself left a pleasant but not a very memorable impression.

Great Expectations is Dickens’s one serious study of the growth of personality. (Ernest A. Baker, p.306-308)

In Great Expectations, those Pip meets with are hardly less wonderful; but Pip himself is interesting, and still more interesting are the ordeals through which he arrives at self-knowledge, realizes the value of what he has slighted in Joe Gargery and Biddy, and puts himself right at last with those faithful friends. Pip’s agonies are much more trying. All the old friends and townsfolk who knew him as the poor boy in the blacksmith’s shop have to be duly impressed with the fact that he is now a young gentleman with expectations. He has to flabbergast the old humbug Pumblecook, and show an imperturbable face to the scurrilous Trabb’s boy’s chaff.

And Pip is not David. His airs of dignity and condescension make him an easier prey to ridicule, and are the cause of untold anguish when he discovers the odious source of all his great expectations.

CONCLUSION

The Victorian era is well known for the great development of the Industrial Revolution which had officially begun in 1750 in England.

During the nineteenth century Britain witnessed several changes in different fields, especially social. These changes occurred because of the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, which made Britain the first Industrial country in the world and its economic power.

The economic progress during that time resulted in many social problems, such as poverty and bad living conditions. This situation attracted several Victorian writers, interested in expressing the spirit of the age, with all the resources of imagination and feeling to write about these social problems.

Charles Dickens is one of them who is considered the dominant literary figure of the age. He used his literary work to render the social suffering of his time, especially of children who endured many hardships, as he did in his own childhood experience.

Charles Dickens described the great battle of good and evil; accepted a working Victorian compromise about what should happen behind the scenes and what on the stage.

Dickens voiced the predicament of the dispossessed in his stories of human resilience and survival. Dickens’ realism makes the incredible credible.

An innovation for which Dickens is responsible is the introduction of children in literature. ‘Strange as it seems, till the sun of his genius rose, childhood found practically no expression in English literature’. (Walter Crotch, p. 319). It was he who first treated them as individuals, and used them as leading characters in his novels. His reverent treatment of them did much to undermine the current theory of child depravity. To him …’Childhood was an essentially pathetic and tragic experience’ (Stefan Zweig, p. 8).

With the description of Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Pip and many other orphans, Dickens reveals his fight against the abuses inflicted on Victorian children.

The author illustrates the fates of unfortunate children, victims of the rapid ascension of industrial capital, striving against poverty, mental dejection and humiliation, in a hard and selfish society.

Dickens's personal experience becomes the source of his pathetic understanding for the misery of destitute and unprotected childhood.

He became apprenticed to the Blacking Factory of Lamert and Warren where – owing to his manual dexterity at filling bottles and sticking labels – he was to be exposed in the shop-window as a living advertisment. Dickens was going to refer to this as his period of ‘slavery’, a period of acute suffering, a very nightmare for this sensitive child:

‘…I certainly had no other assistance whatever – the making of my clothes, I think, excepted, from Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no support from anyone that I can call to mind, so help me God.”

The loneliness and gloom are only relieved by his long walks in London, which he views with accuracy, yet with a percentage of exaggeration natural to the childish mind; these are also relieved by dreams of a brilliant future, by ‘Great expectations’.

All in all, Dickens successfully portrays the abuse of children in nineteenth century Britain, eliciting the reader's sympathy to the deplorable and drab conditions of the children.

From Oliver Twist to David Copperfield, Dickens illustrates the child's struggle to exist on terms other than those imposed by an adult or society. David Copperfield’s childhood, like that of other of Dickens’ heroes is an experience of solitude and deprivation, lacking a satisfactory place within a family or society (Chine, 206).

In addition to that, by experiencing a feeling of total abandonment, Dickens' children are usually mistreated, both physically and emotionally (Chien, 195).

Oliver Twist (1838) was the first Dickens ‘novel to confront the reading public with the abused child. It was the story of an orphan boy who suffers a cruel treatment and miserable adventure’ (Thornley and Robert, 21). Dickens writes Oliver Twist to highlight the problems of poor children who after the poor law act of 1833 ended up in the work house.

In Great Expectations, Dickens turned from corruption in society to the corruption of individual (Coote, 469). Pip is an orphan boy from the beginning of the story who comments on the magnitude of injustice in the child's world (Chine, 196). In this novel Dickens describes the orphan boy who is led into moral delusion by Magwitch's money. His self-awareness and the knowledge that human goodness is true is gained by Pip at the cost of painful isolation and suffering (Coote, 470).

Dickens had so far given a complete picture of his epoch. After the attack against an economic structure determining social misery (in Oliver Twist), he continues his satire against the legal system (in David Copperfield).

Charles Dickens’ childhood experience contributed to his sensitivity to the oppression and neglect of children by family or other members of society, in the world of Dickens’ novels, poor orphan or abandoned kids suffer their fate; they are the victims of egoistic adults.

Great Expectations is a book about forced maturation, unrequited love, about searching for true values, dreams and disappointments … all these are part of the childhood and adolescence of a complex character, in which we can all mirror ourselves. It can help each of us find a bright side to disappointments that we sometimes live.

Dickens was clearly aware of the contradictions and antagonisms existing in the capitalist society of his time.

His solution to class antagonism is in human understanding, reconciliation and reciprocal help. The rich should give the poor material help, while the poor should serve as moral examples and agents of the moral conversion of the rich.

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