Charles Dickens: Social Reformer?

Charles Dickens was born in 1812 to an upper middle class English family and spent his childhood in the coastal suburbs of Portsmouth. When his father was incarcerated in debtor’s prison at Marshalsea (1878, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol6/pp57-75), the family moved from the coast inland to London. Dickens subsequently dropped out of school to work in a factory to help his family financially. It was in this environment that Dickens took inspiration for his novels and short-stories about the Victorian working class strife.

Much like how Jack the Ripper is considered to be a social reformer by some scholars, so is Charles Dickens due to the popularity and subject matter of his work. At a time when more of the English population was being enfranchised by the Liberal government, “Dickens contributed significantly to the emergence of public opinion which was gaining an increasing influence on the decisions of the authorities” (Diniejko, “Charles Dickens as Social Commentator and Critic”, 2012). By humanizing the social conditions that resulted from industrialization and urbanization, Dickens was able to make the literate middle/upper classes care about the social welfare of the working class. Although this did not happen immediately, it set the foundation for many of the reforms that were rapidly executed at the later turn of the century.

For example, Dicken’s A Christmas Carol has been interpreted to be a social critique of Thomas Malthus’ demographic theories. Malthus was the author of Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population#/media/File:An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population.jpg) and postulated that the world’s population is contingent upon food supply; an imminent problem exists as population grows exponentially compared to the arithmetic increase of the world’s food supply. In A Christmas Carol, Dickens shows that “the problem was not an inadequate supply of food, but the way food was distributed among people” (Henderson, “What Can Social Economists Learn From Charles Dickens?” p. 144). This is why Dickens uses food as a way to reveal the traits of his characters in A Christmas Carol. When Scrooge is alone at a banquet all for himself, Dickens is alluding to the unequal distribution of resources in Victorian society.

In the context of Victorian urbanization, Dicken’s Oliver Twist offers the best critique of Victorian settlement patterns. In the story, a young protagonist escapes a work house and finds himself in the busy city of London. Dickens writes in detail about the cruel working and living conditions of the workhouse, why offer an insight as to why so many young, poor women took to the streets as prostitutes. Oliver Twist also highlights the semi-nomadic lifestyle of the working class; Twist travels place after place in a short period of time. Through these themes, Dickens is about to show “the possibility that there might be a kind of life outside respectable, bourgeois life” worthy of public interest (Bowen, “Oliver Twist: Depicting Crime and Poverty”). Although he uses the novel as a way to do such, Dickens was able to influence public opinion.