Charles Dickens is one of the most important novelists in English. He wrote at a time when education became possible for more people in Britain and the USA. The new ‘reading public’ loved the exciting stories and amazing characters in Dickens’ books.
People read the stories in monthly instalments in popular magazines, so Dickens learnt to end each chapter with a ‘cliff-hanger’ which would make the readers want to buy and read the next instalment.
Dickens created the narrative style which we can see today in TV soap operas and serialised stories.
Although Dickens was primarily concerned with entertaining his readers, his works had important political influences. 19th century society was very stratified. The rich knew nothing about the living conditions of the poor and working classes. Dickens was like an investigative journalist today. He revealed the terrible conditions of children working in factories. He revealed the horrors of bad schools. He exposed corruption in politics and amongst lawyers. Dickens was, by our standards, a very ‘modern’ writer.
Dickens wrote about his own century. The situations which he describes may appear to be very distant from the experiences of your students’ lives. It is important to remind students that the conditions of the 19th century continue to exist in some parts of the world. Even if our lives today are very different, we can find many parallels between the situations he describes and our current conditions.
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