Fiction novels or any literary writings are tools that let us get carried away from the deep entanglement within the world of imagination. As we take a journey and leap into a new world, we see things for the first time: varying emotions, scenarios, characters, etc. We learn great lessons and ideas that molded our way of thinking or our point of view. These might be a quantifiable evidence that shaped our culture and much of what we believe about life that we had adopted from these literary works of art because it tends to promise an influential, creative, and sparkling change. This is how Charles Dickens had been regarded to be as the greatest novelist during the Victorian era. Through his incredible and exceptional works of literature, there is no doubt he had been hailed as the “The Greatest Instructor of the Nineteenth Century.”
Famed British author Charles Dickens was born Charles John Huffam Dickens on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, on the southern coast of England. He was the second of eight children. His father, John Dickens, was a naval clerk who dreamed of striking it rich. Charles Dickens’ mother, Elizabeth Barrow, aspired to be a teacher and school director. Despite his parents’ best efforts, the family remained poor. Nevertheless, they were happy in the early days. John was sent to prison for debt in 1824, when Charles was just 12 years old. Following his father’s imprisonment, Charles Dickens was forced to leave school to work at a boot-blacking factory alongside the River Thames. Looking back on the experience, Dickens saw it as the moment he said goodbye to his youthful innocence, stating that he wondered “how [he] could be so easily cast away at such a young age.” He felt abandoned and betrayed by the adults who were supposed to take care of him. These sentiments would later become a recurring theme in his writing. Much to his relief, Dickens was permitted to go back to school when his father received a family inheritance and used it to pay off his debts. But when Dickens was 15, his education was pulled out from him once again. In 1827, he had to drop out of school and work as an office boy to contribute to his family’s income. As it turned out, the job became an early launching point for his writing career.1 Charles Dickens had an exceptional talent of using symbolism of describing his society, nature, working class and time. He learned to weave them together to come up with an appropriate theme, character and plot based on his comprehensible visions of the Victorian era, especially the lives of those on the margin of society. According to Ruth Glancy, Charles Dickens’s incredible “…shrewd and complex insight into human psychology (found often in his exploration of dreams and symbols) had been recognized and valued...”2 This complex insight on him had opened various doors that entangle one of the biggest event within the human history. His extraordinary way of compelling various events was successfully intermingled with his provocative, imaginative and figurative ideas. His effective way of approach lead to an exploiting truth about the transitional changes occurred within the nineteenth century that might have a link towards resolving the mysteries of the past, giving an explanation within the present and predicting the outcome towards the future. Society garnered the greatest contribution in manipulating one’s character, development and behavior, especially during the nineteenth century. It could be observed through the gradual changes from being simple to complex form through the process of evolution. According to Graham Storey, this “... strong sense of social purpose… had been an integral part of Dickens’s appeal since his earliest writing.”2 His main focal point was to help those people in need, especially the poor, oppressed and the outcast because his main objective was to cry out for a reformation within the Victorian era. This had appeared later within his writings through the different
