“The Pickwick Papers is not a Victorian document: it belongs to a sunnier time, which perhaps had never existed. The group of novels that follow, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, is charged with the atmosphere of the thirties. They have the Radical faith in progress, the Radical dislike of obstruction and privilege, the Radical indifference to the historic appeal. But they part from the Radicalism of the Benthamites in their equal indifference to the scientific appeal. Dickens’s ideal England was not very far from Robert Owen’s. But it was to be built by some magic of goodwill overcoming the egoism of progress; not by law, and most emphatically not by reason.” — G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age
- Dickens's Satire of British Parliamentary Elections: Eatanswill, Essex
- Class Disparities and Linguistic Mannerisms in Gaskell and Dickens
- Dickens and Social Class
- Social and Economic Forces Influencing Pickwick's Mass Readership
- Dickens "the man who invented Christmas"
- Challenging Social Hierarchies in Pickwick and North and South
- Carlyle and Dickens on the Dark Side of Freedom of the Press
- Blindness in Jane Eyre and The Pickwick Papers
- The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on Servant-Master Relationships
- Institutionalized Corruption
- Passion Versus Reason
- The Rebellious Servant in Dickens and Gaskell
- The Pride of the Servant Class
- Trudging Through Urban Life: Images of the Working Class in Pickwick and North and South
- Charles Dickens and Two Kinds of Punch
- Social Commentary and Shifts in Narrative Voice and Tone
Related Materials
- Sections on lawyers and trials from the later London Characters and the Humourous Side of London Life (1871)
- Discussions of social and political themes and contexts in Great Expectations
Last modified 16 November 2019