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In 1852-53 Dickens writes “Bleak House”. The novel is a bitter criticism of England’s court of
justice and aristocracy. In 1854 Dickens published “Hard Times” – a novel of social criticism
directed against the English bourgeoisie and its reactionary ideology. The novel describes an
imaginary town Cocktown, an industrial city resembling similar industrial centers of Middle
England. It was a town of red brick, a town of machinery and tall chimneys. It had vast piles of
buildings full of windows where there was a rattling and trembling all day long. It contained
several large and small people all very like one another, who all went in and out at the same
hours to do the same work and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow. The
population of the town is sharply divided into two classes, the bourgeoisie and the working class.
“Little Dorrit” (1855-57) – is the story of a little girl whose parents are thrown into a debtors’
prison. The complicated plot of the novel serves as a background against which the author lays
bare the reactionary essence of the English state system.
Dickens’ next novel “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859) is devoted to the events of the French
revolution (1789-94).
Dickens’ genius has created novels and tales which have won a standing in the treasury of
the world literature. Dickens naively believed in the moral self-perfection of the wicked classes
and did not accept the necessity of struggle of the masses against their oppressors. But in spite of
these drawbacks Dickens remains a great humanist and castigator of the vices of the capitalist
world. The greatest English realist of the time Charles Dickens with a striking force and
truthfulness created pictures of bourgeois civilization of his time. In his works he utters his
protest against workhouses, debtors’ prisons, bad schools, the exploitation of children, the rich
class. In spite of his sympathy for the poor there are few portrayals of proletarians in his novels,
and there are no typical characters of the working class. Dickens never allied himself with the
latter even when he worked at a factory for a living. He remains from beginning to end a
humane, sentimentally kind petty bourgeois intellectual. His pathos and laughter are means of
touching the hearts, especially of the hard capitalists, of whom he had created numerous types in
his works. He wants to teach and reform these exploiters rather than stir up revolution among the
suffering and exploited. Clinging to the idea that a hard-working and honest man can achieve his
little individual happiness in capitalist society Dickens tinges the novel with optimism.
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