The Age of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is a spokesman of his age, a social critic, a reformer and an inexhaustible inventor of comic characters and plots. There is hardly another English novelist of such wide popularity all over the world. His novels are history and fiction, a picture and symbol of an age.

The Victorian age was one of unprecedented economic development following the Industrial Revolution, remarkable scientific and technical achievements, colonial expansion and external security, as England was not engaged in any great war during the epoch.

In the Victorian age England became highly industrialized and a modern economy developed. The force of steam power was used for railways, printing presses and a merchant fleet which had no equal in the world. England invested in all continents and was the world’s banker. It reached its pinnacle of power and prestige. It was so powerful as the ancient Rome had been. Trade was the stimulus for the growth of the vast empire. English colonialism expanded in the 19th century with almost the rapidity of its 20th century dissolution. India became a British Colony and Australia, which was almost forty times the size of England, was open to colonization and commerce.

Queen Victoria’s ascent to the throne of England in 1837 and her death in 1901 do not set in fact the limits of the epoch as the signs of the new era may be traced to the decade between 1830 and 1840. The new age really began in 1832 with the passage of the Reform Bill which opened the way to a series of important changes in the political and administrative life of Britain, and it closed at the end of the Boer War in 1902. The age is usually divided into three periods: Early Victorian (1832-1848) when the conditions for England to become a modern and industrialized state were prepared; Mid-Victorian (1848-1870) when England achieved economic and political preeminence. The period is associated with a general feeling of prosperity; Late Victorian (1870-1901) which marks a gradual decline of the Victorian certainties and a threatening of England’s economic, financial and political supremacy.

The Industrial Revolution produced social and economic transformation increasing the difference between the rich and the labouring poor. The hard conditions of the agricultural labourers and the general instability of life favored emigration in large numbers to the industrial towns as well as to the colonies and the United States.

The foreign world disliked the English merchant, but it greatly envied him and grudgingly admired him. The honesty and the integrity of the English manufacturer and merchant were a global saying. The Victorians possessed an English conscience exclusively unfeeling exploiters of their fellows. They did private charity and public service which proved them worthy inheritors of the tradition of the stable England. “Victorian”, as we use the word, is a label for the chronological period 1837-1901, the reign of Queen Victoria. But, “Victorian” as to describe the spirit of the era had different meanings. In the early 20th century, the term meant smug, stuffy, narrow-minded, prudentially moral, hypocritically righteous and naively optimistic. Evangelical Protestantism was the main factor which lead to such an interpretation of the term “Victorian”.

The Crimean War (1854-1856) was the only European conflict in which Britain was directly involved. England fought against Russia, defending Turkey and considered Russia to be a barrier to its growing power.

A great number of people moved in industrial cities and led to the growth of slum areas. Cheap houses were built and many people were crowded into one room. This created a difficult situation mainly concerning health. Charles Dickens emphasized the slums of London in Oliver Twist. Cholera was spread between 1831, in 1848 and 1853 and 1854.