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Originally Posted by HarryT
Dickens . . . found, for example, that sugar-coated sentimental scenes of dying children sold like the proverbial hot cakes, and put them in several of his books precisely because of that.
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Dickens often wrote for effect and the result was both intentional and unconscious. The intentional aspect is reflected in his ambitions and successes. The unconscious aspect is betrayed by his mannerisms, such as his notorious lapses into iambic pentameter in sentimental paragraphs.
He not only wrote for money and popularity but was irrepressibly jealous of writers who were more popular than he. He published at least one article in which he vilified the most successful writers of his time for supposed moral lapses.
I've been trying to hunt down the name of the piece in which Dickens essentially attacked everyone who leaped ahead of him on the bestseller lists of the day but haven't found it so far. An article about him (in the
New York Review of Books, possibly) also points out that everyone whom Dickens attacked is no longer read or even known outside specialists' circles.
Although Dickens' admirers (and many credible historians) consider social reform to be his motive for writing and the ultimate effect of his work, Dickens himself did not explore any constructive alternatives to the grim industrial world he portrayed:
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The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power.
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-- George Orwell, "Charles Dickens"
It's possible that what motivated Dickens to write about the abusive work conditions he encountered as a child was their potential for sentimental catharsis and shock value. Then again, the pain and trauma brought about by those conditions, and the vindication he must have found in surviving them, are powerful incentives to write about them as well.