Question- Write a note on Dickens's contribution to English novel.

Answer-

Dickens is regarded as the greatest and most popular novelist of England. His main contribution to the English novel was that he was the first great writer to write the humanitarian novel. The second contribution of Dickens to the English novel was that he restored to it idealism which had departed from it. Neill considers the discovery of new sources of humour as Dickens' main contribution to the English Novel. Perhaps Dickens' major contribution to literature, that which gives him his rank among the giants, was his discovery of new sources of humour.

Dickens is a delineator of low life. He is a novelist of the hearth and home. He is good at the delineation of children. Dickens is said to be a "capital at a baby". Humour is the supreme quality of Dicken's genius. His gift of pathos is inalienably connected with the gift of humour. Dickens is a master prose writer. He is often too much full of mannerisms.

F. R. Leavis has called him as a great entertainer but he has said that he is one who lacks the profound responsibility of a "creative artist". Some of the limitations of Dickens as an artist. There is fault in characterisation because his range of characterisation is limited. His imagination roams in romantic situations. Reality to create picturesque and emotional effects, ist falsified or distorted. His plots are weak and incoherent. He has no sense of form. His plots are like shapeless bags. There is much that is superfluous and irrelevent in them.

Charles Dickens is the foremost representative novelist of the Victorian era, born in lower-class society. Dickens was brought up in an atmosphere of adversity and educated in suffering. A pioneer-writer of lower middle class society and of the life of the town-folk in their varied ways, Dickens is a social novelist as well as a social reformer, a writer who moralises with a smile on his lips. Portraying the ruivering image of the anguished soul of poverty under the garb of realism. Dickens helped to intensify the suggestion of active charity. This is what made Dickens as apostle and his work a gospel of humanitarianism. It is in this respect that Dicken's work contributes to the idealistic reaction of the time.

While the background of his novels conforms with the life of a middle class, his character delineation finds itself in harmony with typical English temperament. Humour and humanity are two other outstanding characteristics of Dickens as a novelist. No other writer has touched with pity and tenderness the springs of English national life as Dickens has done. Dickens is not a great and consunimate literary artist, not a great psychological writer, not a thorough going realist, not a seductive-story-teller but he is the greatest of the national novelists of England. A man of people who wrote for the people. Dickens is the spokesman of the masses and the creator of the democratic novel. Happy benignity, radiant humanity and intense sympathy mark off the novels of Dickens as great." -(Goodman)

The real, the great, the unique merit of Dickens is that he brought to the service of the novel an imagination which, though it was never poetic, was plastic in almost the highest degree, and that he, communicated to the results of it a kind of existence which, through distinctly different from that of actual life, has a reality of its own and possesses the distinguishing mark of genius, so that if it does not exactly force belief in itself, it forces suspicion of disbelief. To have done this is not only to have accomplished a wonderful artistic triumph but to confer an immense benefit on the human race. But in doing it Dickens exhibits various foibles, prejudices and disabilities though it is quite open to anyone to maintain that these rather assisted the flow of his imagination that hindered it. He began very young, he had curiously little literature, his knowledge of life, extraordinary alert and acute was very one- sided, and the organs by which he attained it seen absolutely to shut themselves and refuse communism with certain orders of society and classes of human creature.

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