Flight from gentility: the role of working-class characters in Dickens' novels

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to study working-class characters in Dickens's novels in relation to one particular aspect of social change, namely gentility, and to connect this with Dickens's social criticism and with his distinctive qualities as a creative artist. I shall argue that gentility is not merely a concern with superficial manners and behaviour, but that the concept became, during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth., the most important psychological weapon in the struggle for social and political power in a newly-emerging class society. As such., gentility provides the main target for Dickens's attacks upon class relations and is the focus of his most wide-reaching criticisms of English society. - Indeed, so central is the concept of gentility to Dickens's thought, that it can even be used as a critical term to define his own particular kinds of strengths and weaknesses as a writer. It is a main purpose of this thesis to show the interrelationship of these several aspects of gentility with the pattern of Dickens's life and with the changing society of nineteenth-century England.

Part One of this thesis considers Dickens's attitudes to the class divisions within Victorian society by studying his deployment of class language. In this section I also compare Dickens's fictional rendering of working-class characters with that of his contemporaries and his eighteenth century predecessors., in order to see what is distinctive in Dickens's treatment, and to evaluate how far he may be termed a realist.

Parts Two to Four trace, chronologically, the development of Dickens's antagonism towards gentility. I divide his work into three periods (early, middle, late), in each of which a different, but recurrent type of working-class character tends to predominate in the novels. The qualities and values Dickens associates with each type can be related to his current underlying social and artistic preoccupations. Because of the accumulative poetic intensity of Dickens's fictional style, discussion of character or incident, lifted from its allusive context., almost always results in an impoverishment, or even an actual confusion, of meaning. For this reason, the chapters dealing with single novels are divided into two parts. They begin with a general discussion of one particular type of working-class character frequently found in Dickens's fiction. An individual example of this type is then studied in the total context of the specific novel to see how its qualities fit intol, and help to shape, the imaginative pattern of the whole work. The novels chosen for this close study are thus those which contain a character who is a major example of one of these recurrent working-class types in Dickens's fiction, and this is why Hard Times and Little Dorrit are not discussed in detail.

A further aim of this thesis is to redress a tendency in Dickens criticism to underrate the role of working-class characters in the novels. It is striking that Dickens himself consistently speaks of them as among his most important artistic achievements. It is my contention that to ignore this particular aspect of Dickens's work is to miss much of what is most exciting in his art and most radical in his social vision.