The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

In 1858, when Dickens separated from his wife, his life and work changed. He became involved with the actress Ellen Ternan, and he took up residence at Gad's Hill, a gentleman's house in Kent. Abandoning amateur theatricals, he embarked on a series of lucrative professional readings; they were so emotionally and physically exhausting that his doctor finally instructed him to stop. He slowed the pace of his writing, publishing only two novels in the 1860s: Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend (1864�65). He died suddenly in 1870, leaving his last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), unfinished.

Dickens's early fiction is remarkable for its extravagance, which Franz Kafka calls

"Dickens's opulence and great, careless prodigality." It marks many elements of his

novels�their baggy plots, filled with incident; the constant metaphorical invention

of their language; and the multitude of their characters. Anthony Trollope observed

that no other writer except Shakespeare has left so many "characters which are known

by their names familiarly as household words, and which bring to our minds vividly

and at once, a certain well-understood set of ideas, habits, phrases and costumes,

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making together a man, or woman, or child, whom we know at a glance and recognize at a sound, as we do our own intimate friends."

Dickens builds character from a repeated set of gestures, phrases, and metaphors. For example, whenever Mrs. Micawber enters the story of David Copperfield, she repeats, "I will never desert Mr. Micawber." Having a "slit of a mouth" into which he posts his food, Wemmick in Great Expectations rarely appears without some reference to his "post office" mouth; Mr. Gradgrind is always identified in Hard Times with the squareness of each of his physical attributes. This way of creating character led the novelist E. M. Forster to use Dickens to illustrate what he means by a flat, as opposed to a round, character. Such a reductive technique of characterization might seem to have little to offer by way of depth of insight, but this is not the case. In particular, as Dickens's fiction becomes more complex in the course of his career, the repeated tics that identify his characters come to represent emotional fixations and social distortions. Dickens's early fiction exults in its comic exaggeration of human peculiarities. In his later fiction that comedy becomes grotesque, as the distortions of caricature reflect failures of humanity in his increasingly dark social vision.

Bernard Shaw wrote that "Dickens never regarded himself as a revolutionist, though he certainly was one." Dickens's early novels often concern social abuses� the workhouses in which pauper children were confined in Oliver Twist, abusive and fraudulent schools in Nicholas Nickleby. As his career progressed, Dickens felt an increasing urgency about the social criticism his novels made. He gave Hard Times the subtitle For These Times and dedicated the book to Thomas Carlyle, indicating his ambition to write a work in the tradition of Carlyle's social indictment, "Signs of the Times" (1829). In his middle novels Dickens's criticism of society becomes increasingly systemic, and he begins to use organizing metaphors to express his social vision. Bleak House, for example, concerns the failings of the legal system, but the obfuscation and self-interest of the law are symptomatic of a larger social ill, symbolized in the smothering fog whose description begins the novel.

Despite the bleakness of Dickens's view of society and the fierceness of his criticism of it, his novels always end with a sentimental assertion of the virtues of home and heart. Readers and critics alike in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often felt that this sentimentality blunted his social analysis: although Dickens tries to use fiction to stir the human heart and evoke humanitarian feelings, the domestic refuges of his novels never change the world outside. In more recent times, and in the wake of D. A. Miller's study of Victorian fiction, The Novel and the Police (1988), many critics now express no surprise about this narrowing of scope: according to Miller, cultural productions (such as the novel) that emanate from the heart of a bourgeois society inevitably reproduce the controlling mechanism that regulates that world as a whole, and the seemingly subversive social critique at the beginning of a Dickens novel will ultimately be contained within an idealized middle-class sitting room at its close. Such scholars throw into question the earlier view of this novelist as an energetic, if conflicted, critic of his age: Dickens is instead perceived as an unofficial spokesman of conservative ideologies. Yet there are certainly many different ways to think about unresolved tensions within Dickens's work, and the teeming pages of his fourteen novels and wide range of other writings offer endless inspiration.