Novels
Among his best known works are Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and A Christmas Carol.
David Copperfield is argued by some to be his best novel — it is certainly his most autobiographical — however Little Dorrit, a masterpiece of acerbic satire masquerading as a rags-to-riches story, is on a par with the very best of Jonathan Swift and should not be overlooked.
Dickens' novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society.
Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theaters and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. Dickens himself had a flourishing career as a performer, reading scenes from his works. He travelled widely in Britain and America on stage tours.
Dickens' writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery — he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator" — are wickedly funny. Some of his characters are grotesques; he loved the style of 18th century gothic romance though it had already become a bit of joke (see Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey for a parodic example).
Like several of his contemporaries, some of his works in today's context, are perceived as being marred by anti-Semitism. For example, the character Fagin in Oliver Twist is depicted as a stereotypical Jew, with passages describing his hooked nose and greedy eyes. Dickens, it should be remembered, lived in a society which pre-existed the Holocaust, and it can be argued that he was writing for dramatic effect: Fagin, when all is said and done, is a caricature, one of the great pantomime villains of fictions.
Dickens had few dealings with flesh and blood Jews until 1860 when he sold his home, Tavistock House to a Mr. Davis, a Jewish banker. His journal entries are initially deprecatory; the subsequent conduct of the banker and the ease with which the transaction was effected caused him to rethink and revise his whole position in this area.
Dickens' response to the (mild) criticism of Fagin emanating from the Mrs Davis (the wife of the self-same banker), writing in the Jewish Chronicle, is revealing:
- "Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is a Jew, because it unfortunately was true of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew ... and secondly, that he is called 'the Jew' not because of his religion but because of his race."
It should be noted that in an