Editing Charles Dickens (section)

===Social commentary===
[[File:Martin Chuzzlewit illus11.jpg|thumb|right|upright|Nurse [[Sarah Gamp]] (left) from ''Martin Chuzzlewit'' became a stereotype of untrained and incompetent nurses of the early Victorian era, before the reforms of [[Florence Nightingale]].]]
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of [[social commentary]]. [[Simon Callow]] states, "From the moment he started to write, he spoke for the people, and the people loved him for it."<ref>{{cite news |title=My hero: Charles Dickens by Simon Callow |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/04/my-hero-charles-dickens-callow |date=12 February 2012 |access-date=7 November 2021 |work=The Guardian |archive-date=7 November 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211107140015/https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/04/my-hero-charles-dickens-callow |url-status=live}}</ref> He was a fierce critic of the poverty and [[social stratification]] of [[Victorian era|Victorian]] society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen".<ref>{{harvnb|Ackroyd|1990|p=345}}.</ref> Dickens's second novel, ''Oliver Twist'' (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed.<ref>{{harvnb|Raina|1986|p=25}}.</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Bodenheimer|2011|p=147}}.</ref> Today, ''Dickensian'' is a term applied to insanitary social conditions or grim institutions akin to those denounced by Dickens in his work, with Oxford professor [[Peter Conrad (academic)|Peter Conrad]] writing, "Dickens, like [[Banksy]], writes blackly prophetic graffiti on the wall."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Conrad |first1=Peter |title='He contains the whole of literature': is Dickens better than Shakespeare? |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/02/is-dickens-better-than-shakespeare |access-date=3 March 2025 |work=The Guardian |date=2 March 2025}}</ref>

At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as [[sanitation]] and the [[workhouse]]—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in ''Hard Times'' (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in ''The Pickwick Papers'' are claimed to have been influential in having the [[Fleet Prison]] shut down. [[Karl Marx]] asserted that Dickens "issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together".<ref name="KucichSadoff">{{harvnb|Kucich|Sadoff|2006|p=155}}.</ref> [[George Bernard Shaw]] even remarked that ''Great Expectations'' was more seditious than Marx's ''[[Das Kapital]]''.<ref name="KucichSadoff"/> The exceptional popularity of Dickens's novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (''Bleak House'', 1853; ''Little Dorrit'', 1857; ''Our Mutual Friend'', 1865), not only underscored his ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. ''Bleak House'', a satire of  protracted legal cases with ''[[Jarndyce and Jarndyce]]''—a fictional long-running [[Court of Chancery|Chancery]] case which has been cited by courts as a symbol of a legal case that interminably drags on—the central plot of the novel, helped support a judicial reform movement that culminated in the enactment of [[Judicature Acts|legal reform]] in England in the 1870s.<ref>{{cite book |title=Law Reform and Law Making: A Reprint of a Broadcast Talks |author=British Broadcasting Corporation. Third Programme, Charles John Hamson|date=1953 |publisher=W. Heffer |page=16}}</ref>

It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of [[Charles Darwin]]'s ''[[On the Origin of Species]]''.<ref>{{harvnb|Atkinson|1990|p=48}}, citing [[Gillian Beer]]'s ''Darwin's Plots'' (1983, p.8).</ref>