The history of originality of novel
A firm of London publishers, Messrs. Chapman & Hall, who sought Dickens out to provide the text for a serialized picture novel with drawings done by famous illustrator. There was to be a club, the members of which were to be sent on hunting and fishing expeditions into the country. Though the subject of the novel—a sporting club going on excursions throughout England and having various misadventures— Dickens he was neither sportsman or outdoorsman, he agreed to take on the project.
The story thus became the prime source of interest, and the illustrations merely of secondary importance. By this reversal of interest, Dickens transformed, at a stroke, a current type of fiction, consisting mostly of pictures, into a novel of contemporary London life.
Characters
Central characters
Samuel Pickwick — the main protagonist and founder of the Pickwick Club. Following his description in the text, Pickwick is usually portrayed by illustrators as a round-faced, clean-shaven, portly gentleman wearing spectacles.
Nathaniel Winkle — a young friend of Pickwick's and his travelling companion; he considers himself a sportsman, though he turns out to be dangerously inept when handling horses and guns.
Augustus Snodgrass — another young friend and companion; he considers himself a poet, though there is no mention of any of his own poetry in the novel.
Tracy Tupman — the third travelling companion, a fat and elderly man who nevertheless considers himself a romantic lover.
Sam Weller — Mr Pickwick's valet, and a source of idiosyncratic proverbs and advice.
Tony Weller — Sam's father, a loquacious coachman.
Alfred Jingle — a strolling actor and charlatan, noted for telling bizarre anecdotes in a distinctively extravagant, disjointed style.
Summary
The travelling society formed by the Pickwick Club of London comprises of four members. Mr. Pickwick is a businessman and philosopher; Mr. Tracy Tupman is a ladies’ man who never makes a conquest, Mr.Augustus Snodgrass, a poet who hasn’t ever written a poem and Nathaniel, an inept sportsman with no medals or awards. Their travel experiences turn out to be comic misadventures as every personage in the Novel is drawn comically with exaggerated features of characters.
Themes
Law and Politics
Many of society's problems, as Dickens saw it, revolved around law and politics. In The Pickwick Papers, lawyers and politicians are, for the most part, watching out for themselves rather than serving the public.
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Suffering of the Poor
Every Dickens novel addresses the suffering of the poor in some way. Dickens was greatly affected by his father's imprisonment for debt. In The Pickwick Papers, Dickens complains about a system that allows people to be ensnared and to suffer in a system they could never escape.
The Pickwick Papers is full of stories of good people who cannot escape from poverty or debtors' prison.
Marriage and Love
Much of this novel focuses on love and marriage, which do not always, in this society, go together. Dickens seems to argue that marital problems occur when people marry for societal reasons, such as money or respect, but when people marry for love, happiness ensues.
Some unmarried people in the book wish to be married to obtain financial stability, or wealth. Mr. Jingle pursues several women and elopes with Miss Rachael Wardle because she has money of her own. Mr. Weller's second wife married him for the money he inherited from his first wife. She keeps tight control of the money during her life, but Sam and Mr. Weller inherit it after her death. That fact provides some consolation to the now-twice-widowed Mr. Weller.
What are the main themes of Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son? Give your examples. Why Charles Dickens explored the theme of child exploitation? Name the novels where this theme is developed. What are the main motives in Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens? Give your examples.
Dombey and Son is a novel by the Victorian author Charles Dickens. It was first published in monthly parts between October 1846 and 1848 with the full title Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation (now rarely used). Dickens started writing the book in Lausanne but travelled extensively during the course of its writing, returning to England to begin another work before completing Dombey and Son. Its serialization coincided with the publication of two other major Victorian novels: William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847–48) and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847).
*Plot summary
The story concerns Paul Dombey, the wealthy owner of the shipping company of the book's title, whose dream is to have a son to continue his business. The book begins when his son is born, and Dombey's wife dies shortly after giving birth.
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The child, also named Paul, is weak and often ill, and does not socialize normally with others; adults call him "old fashioned". He is intensely fond of his elder sister, Florence, whom Mr Dombey neglects as irrelevant and a distraction. He is sent away first for his health, and then to a school near the sea, but he dies, still only six years old.
Dombey pushes his daughter away from him after the death of his son, while she futilely tries to earn his love. She also develops a close friendship with Walter Gay, who once rescued her when she had gotten lost and been kidnapped as a child. Walter works for Dombey and Son, but through the manipulations of the firm's manager, Mr Carker, he is sent off to work in Barbados. His boat is reported lost and he is presumed drowned. Florence is left alone with few friends most of the time.
Dombey remarries; effectively he buys the daughter of an acquaintance in marriage. The marriage is a loveless one; his wife despises him as greedy and herself as shallow and worthless. Her love for Florence initially prevents her from leaving, but finally she conspires with Mr Carker that they shall ruin Dombey's public image by running away together. They do so after she fights with Dombey; when he discovers that she has left he blames Florence and expels her from his house as well. In Paris, Mrs Dombey informs Carker that she sees him in no better a light than she sees Dombey, and that she will not stay with him. Distraught, with both his financial and personal hopes lost, Carker falls under a train and is killed.
After Carker's disappearance it is discovered that he had been running the firm far beyond its means; within a year it collapses and is sold off and Dombey is left a shambles, nearly mad living alone in his decaying house.
Meantime Walter Gay returns home after being fortuitously saved from his shipwreck. He and Florence marry, and she reconciles with her father. Dombey finds happiness in the marriage of his daughter, and all ends well.*
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Major themes
As with most of Dickens' work, a number of socially significant themes are to be found in this book. In particular the book deals with the then-prevalent common practice of arranged marriages for financial gain or as a form of slavery. Other themes to be detected within this work include child cruelty (particularly in Dombey's treatment of Florence), familial relationships, and as ever in Dickens, betrayal and deceit and the consequences thereof. Another strong central theme, which the critic George Gissing elaborates on in exquisite detail in his 1925 work The Immortal Dickens, is that of pride and arrogance, of which Paul Dombey senior is the extreme exemplification in Dickens' work. Gissing makes a number of telling points about certain key inadequacies in the novel, not the least that Dickens' central character is largely unsympathetic and an unsuitable vehicle and also that after the death of the young Paul Dombey the reader is somewhat estranged from the rest of what is to follow.
Charles Dickens' feminist novel Dombey and Son portrays the existence of gender bias towards male children even in wealthy society.
Dickens was individually aware of the exploitation to which the children were subjected because of his own history at workhouse. His work house experience parallels Oliver’s work house experience. Children were exploited and forced to work under harsh circumstances. The Victorian society, mainly the middle class, believed in strong moral values and morals. However, they did not do anything on larger scale to help them or change their condition. Children were susceptible to mistreatment. Dickens successfully portrayed the cruelty of children in the nineteenth century Britain. He evoked readers’ sympathy to the terrible conditions of children.
A Christmas Carol was Dickens’s response to the Children’s Employment Commission Report on the miseries suffered by many poor children. Dickens exposed suggestively selfishness and greed as the dominant features of his England. He described almost in a documentary manner Christmas celebrated by the working poor of early-Victorian England.
Oliver Twist can be read as a textbook of Victorian child abuse and a social document about early Victorian slum life.
David Copperfield (1850). Dickens’s most autobiographical novel, David Copperfield is, like Great Expectations, a great Bildungsroman of a novel told from the perspective of the protagonist.
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