Why Charles Dickens is forever significant

Why Charles Dickens is forever significant

FPJ BureauUpdated: Wednesday, May 29, 2019, 02:52 AM IST
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Fiction is not a mere fabric woven with just imaginary threads. It is, in fact, a concoction prepared with the condiments of imagination that exude the fragrance of its creator’s reality. True to this, Dickens’ novels contain their firm autobiographical roots which do not only spread through a provincial world, limited and claustrophobic of the industrial revolution in England. The world Dickens depicts is one in which he also narrates a commoner’s struggles through his gruelling apprenticeship during his childhood and his bitter experiences of youth.

Therefore, the title of one his famed novels Hard Times is testimony to the harsh life he lived especially before achieving a firm footing in the fiefdom of established authors. Born on February 7, 1812, when the serpent of industrial revolution was rearing its head, Dickens could attain only scanty formal education but this infant prodigy displayed a remarkable genius who would devour books with insatiable hunger for knowledge. His voracious reading habit made him a keen observer of men and the shifting ambience of his country. His father John Dickens was a man of meagre means who was incarcerated for not settling his accounts with moneylenders.

Consequently, Charles’ formal education ended and he had to take up several menial jobs to survive. The horrifying account of his ordeal at the hands of his slave-driver masters has been vividly portrayed in his masterpieces like David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times, etc. Dickens is not against the idea of modernisation, but he strongly raises his staccato against the social evils that assail the commoners in the wake of social development. Such a social development is a mere mask, the rich wear when they mercilessly exploit the poor. Spearheading his crusade against the oppressors with the sword of pen, Dickens lambastes this widening chasm between the rich and the poor. In the Indian context, we can easily relate with it as the gut-wrenching fleecing of the proletariat by the capitalists in India has not ceased yet.

The philosophy of utilitarianism that Dickens denounces is all pervasive in our country. Thus, Dickens can be plugged-in the Indian social milieu which was so poignantly delineated by India’s Munshi Premchand and MR Ananad. That’s the reason, years ago Meenakshi Mukherjee of DU said about Dickens that our collective poverty can be equated with the poor mill-workers’ fate of English society, which also has a sharp divide between opulence and oppression.

Dickens, like Premchand and Anand, lent a voice to those who were subjugated. And this wasn’t a sibilant voice lacking in conviction. It was the voice of a writer who experienced and couched his perceptions in a language of ever-relevant universality. Therefore, Dickens is forever significant.

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