Charles Dickens was considered the most representative Victorian novelist and one of the greatest. As a novelist, he was a social chronicler who introduced social novels on a broad scale through works like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, and Bleak House. Dickens' characters included normal people, abnormal people, satirical portraits, grotesques, and villains. While his characters lacked development and surprised, they felt vividly alive due to his imagination. Dickens was also a popular author interested in social reform who used his novels to raise awareness of social issues, teaching implicit and explicit lessons of humanity and charity, though his works sometimes suffered from his preoccupation with social problems.

1. St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr
Charles Dickens as a novelist Or Features of his novels
According to David Cecil, Dickens is “the most representative of Victorian
novelists and the greatest. He surpasses all the others, in his basic humanity, a childlike
simplicity, and an amazingly bountiful imagination.
As a novelist, Dickens is a social Chronicler. He is found to have introduced social
novels in a much broader sense. He is the writer of some great novels such as Pickwick
Papers, Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and Bleak House in which his
comic view of life, social criticism, power of storytelling and use of humor have been
vividly exemplified.
Dickens’s Characters:
The normal
The abnormal
Satirical portraits
The grotesques
The villains (drawn for a special purpose)
The abnormal characters do not embody "normal" reality, but they are not
essentially unrealistic. It is curious that Dickens succeeds better with the abnormal than
with the normal characters. Normality does not attract him on account of being dull and
"ordinary."
Dickens is more successful with characters drawn from the middle and lower
classes of his society. As a child and young man he had seen and even experienced the
life of these classes. It was in his blood even after he had become successful in the field
of fiction. . Dickens’ characters do not “develop,” and they do not surprise. But in spite of
their lack of development and their numerous peculiarities, they are “living” beings, of
tremendously vital imagination.

2. Their popularity:
At the age of 26 Dickens was a popular author. This was a happy state of affairs
for him and to his books. It served as an ardent stimulus but there were also
disadvantages. The demand for his novels was so enormous that it often lead to hasty
and ill-considered work; to crudity of plot, to unreality of characters and looseness of
Style. It also lead to the harmful habit of issuing the stories in parts. This in turn resulted
in much padding and in irregularity of construction. The marvelous thing is that with so
strong a temptation to slope-work he created books that were so rich and enduring.
B. His Interest in Social Reform:
Dickens’ art is art with a purpose. Dickens did not shut himself up in an ivory
tower of such a kind as “aesthetic culture”. Though Dickens’s works embody no
systematic social or Political theory, from the first he took himself very seriously as a
social reformer. His novels aroused public interest in many of the evils of his day. In
many ways his work suffered from his preoccupation with social problems.
He strikes from first to last a loud and clear note of humanitarianism which is the
most attractive note in his novels. Many a novel of Dickens seems to have been built
around a particular social theme. Social criticism is the basic lesson of humanness and
charity which almost all Dickens’ novels teach implicitly or explicitly.
C. His Imagination:
No English novelist excels Dickens in the multiplicity of his characters and
situations. Pickwick Papers the first of the novels teems with characters, some of them
finely portrayed. He creates for us a whole world of people. In this world he is most at
home with persons of the lower and the middle ranks of life. One very peculiar feature
of Dickens’ work as a novelist is that his novels, when joined together, create a world of
their own, somewhat different no doubt from our world and even the real world of his
own day.

3. D. His Humor and Pathos:
Dickens humor is broad humane and creative. His humor is not very subtle but it
goes deep and in expression it is free and vivacious. His satire is apt to develop into
mere parody. As for his pathos, in its day it had an appeal that appears amazing to a
later generation, whom it strikes as cheap and over-sentimental. His devices are often
third rate as when they depend upon such themes as the deaths of little children which
he describes in detail. His genius had little tragic force. He could describe the horrible,
and he could be painfully melodramatic. But he seems to have been unable to
command the simplicity of real tragic greatness
E. His Mannerisms:
His mannerisms are many and they do not make for good in his novels. It has
often been pointed out that his characters are created not “in the round” but “in the
flat”. Each represents one mood, one turn of phrase. In his fashion his characters
become associated with catchphrase.
F. His Style:
In time his style became mannered also. At its best it is neither polished nor
scholarly but it is clear, rapid and workmanlike, the style of the working journalist. In his
more aspiring flights, in particular in his deeply pathetic passages he adopted a lyrical
style, a kind of verse-in-prose that is blank verse slightly disguised.
In spite of the many number of flaws and limitations from which Dickens’ art as a
novelist suffers, he is a great novelist. His humor, basic human sympathy, and his rich,
vitalizing imagination are his basic assets, even though he is deficient in the architectural
skill as well as other formal and “technical” qualifications as a novelist.