Charles Dickens and the Use of Violence in His Works

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Charles Dickens was an English novelist in the nineteenth century who became one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. In his works, Dickens combined masterful storytelling, humor, pathos and irony with a strong sense of social criticism and an acute observation of people both real and imagined (Kaplan 1). Dickens like other writers before and after him, also employed scenes of great violence to enhance his stories. In some cases, the violence is only verbal, but in others, it is actual physical violence. Charles Dickens used violence in his work to reveal emotion, express pain and suffering and to reflect a particular historical period.Charles John Huffam Dickens was born February 7, 181 to John and Elizabeth Dickens, in Portsmouth, England. After moving to Chatham, the Dickens family fell on hard times and moved to London. Dickens lived in London during his youth; it was here, that at the age of nine he attended school. As of a result of his fathers imprisonment, he was unable to pursue school and was forced to support himself by working in a blacking warehouse. For the most part Dickens was self-educated. According to Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Dickens longed to go to school, to go to college, and to make a name. He regarded himself as a child of good position just about to enter on a life of good luck. He thought his home and family, as a very good spring board or jumping off place from which to fling himself to the positions which he desired to reach until it all fell, and he and all that belonged to him disappeared into the darkness. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted hi!m for life (Chesterton ).Violence from his childhood did affect Dickens in the years to come. George Gissing

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wrote of Dickens, That if any writer has associated himself with the thought of suffering childhood. It is especially the London child whose sorrows one made so vivid to us by the masters pen. In 186, at the age of twenty-four, Charles Dickens married Catherine Hogarth. Together they had ten children. Their marriage ended in turmoil in 1858 when he separated from his wife. Dickens was known to have been unfaithful and have numerous affairs, (Ackroyd ).It was the same year (186), that Dickens had his first successful novel, a comic narrative called The Pickwick Papers. Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. Dickens was a man of enormous energy and wide talents. As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on adventures of a central character as in The Pickwick Papers and Nicolas Nickleby to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity (Gissing). Among the most valued are Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. Charles Dickens major writings include Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, Barnaby Rudge, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cites, and the Mystery of Edwin Drood. Many critics have attempted to use this last work as a key to the understanding of Dickens and his works.Gissing states that This was a time of suffering, of conflict, of expansion, of progress. In the year of Dickenss birth (181) we read of rioting, workmen who smash machinery, and are answered by the argument of force (Gissing). To give one an idea of history during this period of his life, Queen Victoria came to the throne when Charles Dickens was twenty-five years old. His best books are a carnival of liberty, and there is more of the real spirit of the French Revolution in Nicholas Nickerby than in Tale of Two Cities. (Wagenknecht 7) His work glorifies the Revolution.Dickens years of apprenticeship to life and literature were those which saw the rise and establishment of the Middle Class. Charles Dickens worked his way into the Middle Class of London. The people of London socially accepted his writings. Charles Dickens was the voice in England of his humane intoxication and expansion, this encouraging anybody to be anything(Gissing). There are many types of violence used in the different writings of Dickens. The violence of nature was a common element used by authors, Dickens included. He employed both fire and storm to add drama to his novels. In David Copperfield, a storm at sea takes the life of a young man whose life has already been destroyed by lost love. Dickens was fascinated by death. Even the morgue attracted him. Murder also fascinated him. Dickens speaks about the habits of the murders mental habits as if he were the one himself. He even cast himself in the role of a child slayer. A form of violence more exotic and, to Dickens way of thinking, more amusing that capital punishment was cannibalism. His nurse, Mary Weller, who used it to terrify him as a child, introduced him to it (Kaplan 15).Charles Dickens plays with fire in Great Expectations. The blacksmiths furnace flings a path of fire across the road. Miss Havisham goes up in flames, shrieking with a whirl of fire blazing all about her, and Pip is seriously injured in trying to save her. He is burned by the fire of her life. Miss Havisham on fire and the fire of Joes smithy fused in Pips mind. Delirious, after his own narrow escape from being burned in the kiln, he dreams of an iron furnace in a corner of his room and a voice calling that Miss Havisham is burning within. His association with fire warns us that, in Dickenss imaginative landscape, fire is not simply the sign of violence and destruction. It is the leading characteristic of Dickens mind that he is able to see almost everything from two opposite points of view. Fire is the violent and fascinating destroyer on the one hand, and also the source of comfort and security as he sees the glow of Joes forge across the foggy marshes. It repr!esents the innumerable cozy Dickensian in parlors with their blazing logs, a natural accompaniment to comfort and security (Carey 14, 15).A Tale of Two Cities is a novel about the eruption of long suffering people and about putting right or a least finding ways to resolve the mistake, of the past even at the cost of turmoil and death. What Dickens is ultimately concerned with in A Tale of Two Cities is not particular historical event- that is simply his chosen dramatic setting- but rather the relationship between history and evil, how violent oppression breeds violent rebellion which becomes a new kind of oppression (Alter 16). The hero here redeems himself by his death. In the final battle to the death between Mme. Deforge, the matriarch of revolution and blood, and The Miss Pross, the matriarch of love and loyalty; it is Miss Pross who is triumphant. A Tale of Two Cities dramatizes the coming together of Dickens past and his recent present. Here the character Lucie must undergo a trial by suffering, before her bright eyes can shine happily. In this writing the chateau, symbol of aristocratic oppress!ion is fired in a scene reminiscent of the St. Peters fireworks display (Carey 14). At first, the chateau begins to make itself strangely visible. Soon flames burst out of the windows and the house is destroyed in violence. Dickens had a keen interest in the different methods and the precise manner of executing men, another aspect of Dickens preoccupation with violence. The guillotine stands in the foreground of the Tale of Two Cites. Dickens is opposed in principle to capital punishment, he plainly cannot admit to himself that he watches it out of curiosity, like everyone else (Carey 0, 1).When Dickens wrote David Copperfield, he used fire as a projection of the violence and torment. Dickens had death and childhood on his mind, and in David Copperfield he took the impulse to an even deeper, more effective, discreet and revealing expressions. David Copperfield seizes a piece of wood from the fire and strikes a train of red hot sparks into the air, just to impress upon the reader the dangerous state that he is in. Fire can spell peril just as well as passion. Dickens has a weakness for villains whose express intention it is to smash up happy homes. Steerforth smashes the pure Peggotty home by seducing Little Emily. David finds himself among the ruins of the home he had wronged (Carey 17). Also Quilp piercing the admiral with a red-hot poker is recalled in David Copperfields vindictive fantasies relative to Uriah Heep. David is tempted to seize the poker from the fire and run through Heep with it. That night he dreams so vividly about it he has to check !that he is still alive (Bloom 16).Fire is seen in The Bleak House when Ester first comes upon Ada and Richard standing near a great roaring fire. However, there is a screen between them and the fire. Our sense of destruction reaching towards youth and beauty becomes definite when the fire is personified as the red eyes of a lion (Carey 1). Dickens also draws attention to the breath issuing in visible smoke from his mouth, as if the fire was within. Dickens asserts in The Bleak House the consequences of murder are always hidden from the murderer behind a gigantic dilation of his victim, and rush upon him only when the blow is struck. This always happens when the murder is done (Carey 18). In Bleak House the cannibal is the dyspeptic Vholes. Given to regarding Richard as if he were making a lingering meal of him, he finally quits the novel with a gasp suggesting that he has swallowed the last morsel of his client (Carey ,4). This is yet another form of violence. An early version of Krook tells !us of the story of the man that after the meal hebegan to swell and turned blue, and went on swelling until he blew up with a loud explosion.Dickens need to express his violent and murderous instincts through his fiction can be seen, even in Pickwick Papers. Pickwick Papers was an episodic series of humorous adventures, exemplifying a type of popular literature in vogue at the time. The tales of slavery and slaughters are kept apart from the main narrative and are quite untouched by the humor, which pervades it, according to John Cary ( 4 ). The Fat Boy in Pickwick Papers has similar tendencies as in Bleak House. Fat Boy is about to eat a meat pie when he notices Mary, the pretty housemaid, sitting opposite. He leans forward, knife in hand, and speaks to her. There was enough of the cannibal in the young gentlemens eyes, Dickens remarks, to make the compliment a double on (Carey ). The symbol of fire of the story of goblins and the sexton is found in this writing. The goblin king had drunk blazing liquid, and his cheeks and throat were growing transparent as he swallowed it (Chesterton ).Dickens novel Oliver Twist connected itself instead with the contemporary interest in stories of crime and criminals. In Oliver Twist,the scene where Nancy suddenly braves Fagin and Sikes, there are the signs of human passion. Nancy seizes Fagins club and flings it into the fire with force. This was as if human actors were inadequate to handle his idea and the fire was needed to express it ( Carey 1 ).Dickens use of violence can be found in almost all of his writings. Some may have more than others. This violence seems to come from his exposure to the different forms of violence dating from his youth and from his work in the Law Courts. This violence and his obsession with death became incorporated into his works. Dickens also had personal tragedies that may have affected the way the violence plays such a part of the different writings. The use of fire, death and cannibalism was used to express the historic time period and the way people were living their lives. One thing is for certain, Dickens does give a graphic account of each of these types of violence. The violence also gives a very dramatic effect, creating a far more dramatic and interesting story line. Works CitedAckroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York Harper Collins Publisher, 10.Appreciations and Criticism of the Works of Charles Dickens. [Online] Available http//www.lang.nogoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/CD-Chesterton-A&C-l.html April , 1.Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretation Charles Dickenss A Tale of Two Cites. New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 187.Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Interpretations Charles Dickenss David Copperfield. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 187.Carey, John. Here Comes Dickens The imagination of a novelist. New York Schocken books, 17.Charles Dickens A Critical Study. [Online] Available http// lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/GG-CD-.html April , 1. (Gissing)Kaplan, Fred. Dickens a Biography. New York William Marrow & Co., 188.Wagenknecht, Edward. The Man Charles Dickens. Oklahoma University Of Oklahoma Press, 166.

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