he critical realists introduced new characters into literature: they described the new social force in modern history - the working class. They expressed deep sympathy for the working people; they described the unbearable conditions of their life and work; they voiced a passionate protest against exploitation and described their persistent struggle for their rights.
As to Charles Dickens, he supported the radical goals of the Chartists and agreed with Thomas Carlyle, who blamed an idle aristocracy and an unresponsive Parliament for the rise of the movement. Dickens began to write when the Chartist movement, was at its height. Continuous demonstrations in defence of workers « rights took place in many manufacturing towns and in London as well. The actions of the Chartists had considerable effect on Dickens. Though he did not believe in revolutionary action, he was on the side of the people with all his heart. He wanted what the people wanted. Dickens wrote about the poorest.the novel Dombey and Son Dickens unmasked bourgeois respectability and exposed the false morality of the rich behind their cant phrases (insincere talk). Ideas on the power of money form the basis of the novel. With Dombey and Son Dickens »s optimism disappears. A sharp laugh takes the place of his former mild humour. He no longer seeks in the individual villain the cause of all poverty and suffering. His pen is already at work making war against social abuses, like corruption in the law-courts and cruelty and starvation at boarding-schools. Dickens describes in detail the social institutions of the day and draws a vivid picture of the life of the English people. He came to be called the Great Literary Commoner, by which people meant the great democrat in literature.
David Copperfield is an autobiographical novel. It describes child labour and the awful cruelty children suffered when at school or at work. Bleak House is a satire directed against the Court of Chancery, which at that time was the civil court of justice. It attacks the law «s delay and English bureaucracy. Hard Times is not simply an attack on capitalism but on the soulless and unwholesome industrial life it had brought about.his previous works in which he describes the class of the bourgeoisie Dickens now describes the class of the proletariat. The scene is set in a factory town. It is a town of gray streets wrapped in gray smoke coming from black chimneys. Dickens takes the typical features of any English industrial town and makes them the key-note of the book. In Hard Times the writer has lost all hope of finding an ideal happy corner for a worker »s family. Dickens changes: he grows indignant at all injustice, and he becomes sarcastic. Dickens demands social reform as well as the regeneration of man.
1.3 The struggle of good against evil in the works of Charles Dickens
Throughout his career, Dickens protested the abuse of children and the corruptionof individual feelings. His portrayal of the destructiveness of society «s institutions and values ??becomes more insistent and savage in his later novels. In his early, hopeful novels, the problems of his protagonists, who are often orphaned or abandoned as children, are solved by the benevolence of good men; the charitable nature of the Cheeryble Brothers in Nicholas Nickleby is indicated by their ...
