Charles Dickens is a famous representative of critical realism

Major works, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).

In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of nearly his entire correspondence. Only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan burned all of his letters as well, the dimensions of the affair between the two were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray.

In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, so much that he was one of the early members of The Ghost Club.

Last years

On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens tried to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.

Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest, to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866, a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw more readings in England and Ireland.

On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began and Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park. In New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 18 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. During his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised to never denounce America again. By the end of the tour, the author could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.

Death 

On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, he died at Gad's Hill Place never having regained consciousness. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." Dickens's last words, as reported in his obituary in The Times were alleged to have been:Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fullfilled all the rules of art.

On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."

Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The couch on which he died is preserved at the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth.

 

Literary style of  Charles Dickens

 Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic romance, although it had already become a target for parody. One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work. His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his characters' names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. Dickens is one of the masters of prose, but in a sense that carries  qualification. He cannot be compared with

Thackeray for flow of pure  idiom, for command of subtle melodies. He is often mannered to the last  point ofendurance; he has one fault which offends the prime law of  prose composition. For all that, he made uniqueuse of the English  language, and his style must be examined as one of the justifications  of his place in literature. In the beginning it had excellent qualities; his Sketches are  phrased with vigour, with variety, and with a soundness of construction  which he owed to his eighteenth−century studies. Dealing for the most  part with vulgarity, his first book is very free from vulgarisms. In  one of the earliest letters to Forster, he speaks of "your invite"; but  no such abomination deforms his printed pages. Facetiousness is now and  then to blame for an affected sentence, and this fault once or twice  crops up in later books. Someone in Pickwick wears "a grin which  agitated his countenance from one auricular organ to the other"; and in  Bleak House, when grandfather Smallweed threw his cushion at the old  woman, we are told that "the effect of this act of jaculation was twofold". Without much effort Dickens kept clear of such pitfalls; what  might have befallen him but for his fine models and his good sense, we  may surmise from the style of certain of his more or less conscious imitators, Slovenly English he never wrote; the nature of the man made  it impossible. And in this respect he contrasts remarkably with all  save the greatest of his day. ". But Dickens respected both himself and his public never a common virtue in the everyday English novelist.

Characters

Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man and thus create characters to whom readers could relate. Beginning with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves."

Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.The author worked closely with his illustrators supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy." This close working relationship is important to readers of Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the characters as Dickens described them. Film makers still use the illustrations as a basis for characterisation, costume, and set design.Often these characters were based on people he knew. In a few instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, based on Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, based on his wife's dwarf chiropodist. Indeed, the acquaintances made when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author, Virginia Woolf, maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."

Literary techniques

Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of little Nell." (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to."

In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.

 

 

 

 

 

Dickens’ Critical Realism 
The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying characterization of bourgeois reality. As a representative of critical realism, Charles Dickens was the greatest English realist of the time. With a striking force and truth fullness, he creates pictures of bourgeois civilization, describing the misery and sufferings of common people.  
The greatness of Charles Dickens lies not only in their satirical portrayal of bourgeois and in the exposure of the greed and hypocrisy of the ruling classes, but also in their profound humanism that is revealed in their sympathy for the laboring people. He creates positive characters that are quite alien to vices, the rich and who are chiefly common people. The little David, the family of Peggotty and Micawber are vivid characters and representatives of the laboring class.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Analysis of “ Oliwer  Twist”

The novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the 19^th-century London. The author’s intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order and of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens’ first child hero and Fagin the first grotesque figure.

Dickens’s story revolves around young Oliver Twist, an orphan brought up at a “charitable” institution “where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about on the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing.”  After nine years Oliver graduates to a workhouse for young orphans. There his starving fellow sufferers elect him to ask for more food, in punishment for which Oliver is sold to an undertaker. Eventually Oliver runs away, making his painful way to London. Penniless and hungry, Oliver is befriended by a young thief, the Artful Dodger, who introduces him to Fagin and his gang, the evil Bill Sikes, and Sikes’s lover, Nancy. Steadfastly resisting the criminals’ attempts to corrupt him, Oliver eventually escapes, discovers his true parentage, and receives the respect he deserves. Dickens does a creditable job of making Oliver’s unshakable goodness believable. Despite the book’s title, however, Oliver has less to do with the story’s action than do most protagonists. Other characters act toward him or around him more than he acts on his own; his essentially passive role in the novel makes him less interesting than some of the other, more fully drawn characters.

The villains of Oliver Twist are the novel’s most memorable characters. Bill Sikes is stupid, strong, insensitive, and thoroughly evil. With no respect for human life, he insults, threatens, or beats every living thing that gets in his way. Fagin, the clever and devious master of the young thieves, shrewdly manipulates Sikes to his own advantage. Although he apparently retains some shreds of kindness and humanity, Fagin appears primarily as a grotesque, though at times humorous, devil figure. Fagin specializes in corrupting the young. Another evil character, Monks, works behind the scenes for most of the book but exerts an influence.

The truly good characters in the novel are Dickens’s least satisfying. Rose Maylie represents Dickens’s early version of the ideal Victorian woman. She is sweet, unselfish, giving, loving, submissive, completely good-and unbelievable. Harry Maylie’s condescending sacrifice for Rose seems unnecessary at best. Mr. Brownlow fares better; he champions Oliver’s cause, leads the fight against Oliver’s enemies, and has enough personal foibles to make him believable.

Nancy, a prostitute, combines good and bad traits. She lives with Bill Sikes and has stolen for Fagin since her childhood, but she has many admirable qualities. She becomes Oliver’s advocate and defender while Fagin holds him prisoner, and she even betrays her friends to protect him. Dickens ultimately judges Nancy’s sins to be an indictment against Fagin and others who shaped her during her youth. Dickens writes in the book’s preface that Nancy’s character “involves the best and worst shades of our nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility; but it is a truth.” By the end of the book, Nancy receives earthly punishment but heavenly reward.

Dickens’s thematic concern with the nature of good and evil-and the factors that make a person choose one or the other-pervades the novel. Rose Maylie has little temptation to be bad, while Nancy has little opportunity to be good. Oliver is rescued before hunger and desperation force him to compromise his values, and Charley Bates manages to overcome his unfortunate upbringing, although not without great struggle. Others, however, seem doomed from the beginning. Dickens writes that such men as Bill Sikes “would not give the faintest indication of a better nature. Whether every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms, or the proper chord to strike has rusted and is hard to find, I do not pretend to know; but that the fact is as I state it, I am sure.” Dickens wrote Oliver Twist to identify social problems such as the workhouse system, the ineffective legal establishment, and the suffering caused by poverty. But, as always, Dickens’s deepest concern is with individuals. He champions self-sacrifice, benevolence, and charity, and he suggests that personal happiness and social progress can occur only as individuals develop these traits. Oliver Twist is Dickens’s second novel, written when he was still in his middle 20s, and does not display the brilliance of character, thought, form, and language that characterizes his most mature work. Nevertheless, the novel has much to recommend it. Dickens’s realistic descriptions of the London criminal underworld are fascinating and effective. He creates lively characters and situations and has a knack for finding just the right word to devastate a character, drive home a point, or create effective irony or humor. His social criticism still generates animated discussions about similar problems existing today, and the moral issues Dickens raises will probably always face us. Some readers object to Dickens’s use of coincidences to propel the plot of Oliver Twist. He depends on the kinds of unlikely connections that many modern writers carefully avoid; Dickens himself toned down his reliance on coincidence as a plot device in his later works. It is important to note that coincidences even more startling than those in Dickens’s books occurred regularly in other novels of the time, and hence, the Victorian reading public was accustomed to suspending its disbelief to a certain extent when reading novels. Dickens and other Victorian writers sought artistic balance in their plots, and making everything fit together was a time-honored goal of the novelist. More important, Dickens hoped to show that, although those who live comfortably may try to deny any connection with-and therefore responsibility for-the poor, all people are naturally and inescapably interconnected. In later novels such as Bleak House, Dickens succeeds in expressing this theme without resorting to coincidence as often as he does in Oliver Twist.

Initial Situation

Oliver is brought up at the workhouse, and then sent to Sowerberry’s to be apprenticed, and finally runs away. Oliver is on his own from the start. No one pities him, and even though he’s supposed to be looked after by the parish authorities, no one takes care of him. He’s sent from one scene of cruelty and oppression to the next, and finally plucks up the courage to stick up for himself (first by asking for more food, then by hitting Noah in the face, and finally by running away). So, by the end of this stage, Oliver is completely on his own in the big bad world.

Conflict

Oliver is arrested as a thief. Oliver doesn’t realize at first that the Dodger and Fagin are thieves – he’s pretty slow. Once he does realize it, he tries to run away. But it’s as though the very fact of consorting with criminals somehow rubbed off on him, or made him look or seem criminal, himself. The question at this stage isn’t so much whether or not Oliver will actually turn criminal, but whether it even matters – if he can be arrested as a thief without having done anything wrong, does it matter whether he’s corrupted, or innocent?

Complication

Oliver is taken in by Mr. Brownlow, but never returns from his errand.Oliver finally has a friend he can trust, but never gets to tell him his story. In part to prove to Mr. Grimwig that Oliver is trustworthy, Mr. Brownlow sends Oliver off on an errand in the city, from which Oliver never returns. Not, of course, because he was trying to rob Mr. Brownlow, but because he was kidnapped by Sikes and Nancy. But Mr. Brownlow doesn’t know that, and Oliver knows he doesn’t know. Will Mr. Brownlow lose faith in Oliver? Again, does it matter whether Oliver actually is a thief or not, if he looks and acts like a thief? Everyone seems to assume he’s a thief.

Climax

The attempted robbery of the Maylies’ house Oliver is forced to participate in the attempted robbery of the Maylies’ house, and has just about made up his mind to risk being shot by Sikes, and go wake up the household to warn them. But he’s trapped between Sikes and his gun on one side, and Giles and his gun on the other. Again – he’s in a position in which everyone assumes he’s a thief because he’s been hanging out with thieves. What’s a poor orphan to do?

Suspense

Oliver’s been the victim of a giant conspiracy from the beginning! After the Maylies have taken Oliver in and he’s been reunited with Mr. Brownlow, Nancy tells Rose what she overheard between Fagin and Monks. Oliver’s been the victim of a conspiracy, and Monks is behind it all. But they’re not really sure what to do about it.

Denouement

Nancy’s information enables Mr. Brownlow and the Maylie group to force a confession from Monks After Nancy overhears the second conversation between Monks and Fagin, she reports back to Mr. Brownlow and Rose. She gives them enough information to be able to find Monks, and bully a confession out of him. The result is a couple of chapters in which Mr. Brownlow forces Monks to tell all. And what Monks doesn’t know, Mr. Brownlow does, so he is able to throw in the necessary bits.

Conclusion

Everyone is married, adopted, transported, or hanged.All the loose ends get tied off, and we do mean all: Nancy gets murdered by Sikes, and Sikes accidentally hangs himself, saving the executioner the trouble. Monks’s confession enables Oliver to inherit a bit of his father’s estate. Knowing that Oliver is the son of his dead best friend, Mr. Brownlow decides to adopt him (although he probably would have adopted him anyway). Rose gets to marry Harry Maylie. Fagin is arrested and hanged, and the rest of his gang is arrested and transported.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Dickens`s contribution  to   the  English  literature

Dickens's novels combine brutality with fairy-tale fantasy; sharp, realistic, concrete detail with romance, farce, and melodrama.; the ordinary with the strange. They range through the comic, tender, dramatic, sentimental, grotesque, melodramatic, horrible, eccentric, mysterious, violent, romantic, and morally earnest. Though Dickens was aware of what his readers wanted and was determined to make as much money as he could with his writing, he believed novels had a moral purpose–to arouse innate moral sentiments and to encourage virtuous behavior in readers. It was his moral purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens "the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century" in his obituary.During his lifetime, Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in Europe and America. When he visited America to give a series of lectures, his admirers followed him, waited outside his hotel, peered in windows at him, and harassed him in railway cars. In their enthusiasm, Dickens's admirers behaved very much like the fans of a superstar today.Success came early to Dickens; he was twenty-five when his first novel, Pickwick Papers, appeared and made him one of the foremost writers of his day. It is an exuberantly comic novel with almost no shadows, and readers expected all of his novels to follow this pattern. His next two novels, Oliver Twist and  Nicholas Nickelby, fit readers' expectations well enough, and they overlooked the social problems he exposed. As he aged, Dickens's view of his society and human nature grew increasingly somber, a fact which disturbed many readers and critics. A Tale of Two Citieswas attacked for having little, if any humor.Always concerned to make money with his writings, Dickens took seriously  the negative response many readers had to his darker novels.  He deliberately addressed their discontent when he wrote Great Expectations, which he affirmed was written "in a most singular and comic manner." In a letter to a friend, he explained:You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too–and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure that I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.After his death, his literary reputation waned and his novels tended not to be taken seriously. The novelist George Meredith found them intellectually lacking: