Charles Dickens - Social Reformer

William Walter Crotch

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It seems important to emphasize the fact that Charles Dickens was in a very special sense a social reformer. It was not simply tha...

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It seems important to emphasize the fact that Charles Dickens was in a very special sense a social reformer. It was not simply that he loathed shams. With him it was not merely a case of creating characters at which the whole world laughed, humbugs who excited its wrath and impostors who provoked its derision. He was at heart and by conviction a reformer. He looked out upon his age and found corruption in public places and cynicism displayed towards the vital things in national life and character. He found the poor neglected in primary things, such as education, housing, and sanitation, and drilled, dragooned and disciplined out of all reason in non-essentials. Stupendous neglect of child-life went side by side with a grotesquely organized hypocrisy for its welfare. And he set himself to remedy these things, not merely by creating Squeers, Bumble, Jarndyce, Gradgrind, Bounderby, and the rest, but by a constant endeavour in other directions to awaken the social consciousness to clamant evils and imperious needs. More than in his novels, the deep and passionate reforming zeal of the man is disclosed in those many anonymous articles and sketches which he contributed to quite a variety of journals. In these the enthusiasm, the scorn, the hatred, and sometimes even the plaintive acrimony of the real Charles Dickens is to be found. One arises from a perusal of these comparatively unknown examples of his work with a renewed assurance that the views of his characters in his novels were not interpolated merely for the purpose of creating a literary or emotional effect: they were the burning conviction of the creator of the character himself.