Social and Industrial Critique in Dickens' Novels

Oliver's journey and identity

These two works are those in which He is brought into a workhouse and after some bad experience he runs away to London where a gang of pickpockets tries to make him a thief. So characters want to impose a «negative» identity to Oliver to serve their interests The end of the novel is based on Oliver’s «real identity» because he is example of goodness in a corrupted city which was in contrast with the idealized countryside where Oliver will live with his new rich family who saves him from villany, after they were victims of this gang. Monks, Oliver’s half brother, tries to force Oliver nature and forces him to be a thief and trying to ruin his new family to preserve Oliver’s heredity.

Social critique in Dickens's time

The setting is London and was written to criticize the social problems of Dickens's time, such as poorhouses, unfair courts (where lawyers were biased against the poor), and the criminal underworld. Workhouses were based on the idea that poverty was a consequence of laziness and sin, because they caused the poor further misery. Childhood, crime and the terrible aspects of poverty on individual’s life are at the centre of the novel.

Themes of childhood and education

Themes were: Childhood and education, in fact the novel is a Bildungsroman; passionate love from a woman’s point of view; marriage as a relationship between equals saw as balance between reason and feeling; He often talks directly to the reader explaining his decisions, with an emotional use of language.
It is divided into 3 sections: Book the first, ‘’Sowing’’ that introduce Gradgrind that was an educator who treated his children like seeds to be planted.; Book the second, ‘’Reaping’’ that shows the consequences of this educational method: the unhappy marriage of the daughter and the criminal life of the son; Book the third, ‘’Garnering’’ which underline the difficulty in dealing with the consequences of one's actions. It is a ‘’denunciation novel’’ which accuses the negative effects of industrial society. The setting is a fictional city of Coketown, which represents a real industrial town in Victorian England, polluted with ‘’smoke serpents’’ , a symbol of honor for factory owners proud of their production. Characters were people living and working in coketown, like the protagonist Thomas Gradgrind, an educator that try to turn children into machines, but at end he understands the limits of his system. There is also opposition between facts (school) and imagination (circus).

Critique of industrial society

The themes were: critique of Materialism and Utilitarianism (according to an action is morally right if tends to promote happiness); the ugliness of industrial age, with the mechanization of human beings, stopping human emotions and imagination with identical routine such as machines; gap between rich and poor, enlarged by industrialization and exploitation of working class. His aim was to highlight the importance of imagination and sensibility of humans. He uses caricatures to highlight characters' personalities. Indeed the name Gradgrind, is made up of ‘’Grade’’ and ‘’Grind’’ (classificare e schiacciare), related to his educational system that destroy his children's imagination.