This document provides an analysis of how Charles Dickens addressed human rights issues, particularly regarding the protection of children, in his novels. It examines specific characters like Jo from Bleak House who represent neglected children suffering from a lack of basic rights and protections. The document argues that while Dickens was writing before the modern concept of human rights, his works demonstrate an early awareness of societal responsibilities toward vulnerable groups like children. It analyzes how Dickens was critical of the philanthropic approaches of his time and sought to promote a more secular understanding of inherent rights for all people.

1. Human Rights Violations Denounced in the Novels of Charles Dickens
Erin Stubbs
Independent Study Fall 2009
Dr. Carens

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Introduction
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of human rights ideals in the
novels of Charles Dickens; in particular, I seek to prove that the protection of children,
which is today a prevailing ideal of the human rights agenda, arises as a significant theme
throughout Dickens’s work. For example, in Bleak House, the character Jo provides a
stark contrast between the protected people of society and the neglected wretches who
live on the streets. Because Jo is a child, his vulnerability is pronounced and his
pitiableness is perhaps more extensive because he represents not only the larger society’s
neglect of the poor and the helpless, but also its neglect of the future and the posterity that
would inherit it. Jo acts as a severe criticism of a society in which there is no equality of
dignity, in which certain members of the population are ignored, excluded, and denied the
basic acknowledgement that they are, after all, human beings. He is described as being
alive only because “he has not yet died” (217); he has “no father, no mother, no friends,
has never been to school” and does not comprehend the meaning of “home” (147). And
while society would discredit him for living in squalor and knowing “nothink,” Jo’s
situation is the fault of the larger culture, not of Jo himself, because it has neglected its
duties to educate and protect him (217).
Jo represents a larger crisis of Victorian English society, demonstrating a very
specific human rights issue that permeates Dickens’s novels. Jo and other characters like
him prove emblematic of society’s ultimate failure in its responsibility to guarantee the
protection of all its citizens’ inherent rights, particularly those of children. Jo is a victim
of poverty and neglect; because of this, he has no agency and no ability to assert himself

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as a human being with inalienable rights; Jo is told that he is “scarcely human” and is
therefore regarded as undeserving of the basic rights which are granted to better-situated
human beings. What is furthermore ignored in Jo’s case, however, is the fact that when
people neglect the responsibility of conscience, when they ignore fundamental moral
codes in their interactions with other human beings, the consequences will inevitably
affect the society as a whole. Jo is not the only one of his kind; indeed, the shanty town
he inhabits, aptly referred to as Tom-all-Alone’s, is inevitably full of other children just
like him, equally stricken and equally neglected. Likewise, the children of Nicholas
Nickleby, Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, and The Old Curiosity Shop represent the varied
degrees and methods by which human rights violations occurred in Dickens’s
observations of Victorian England.
In her book The Moral Art of Dickens, Barbara Hardy describes Dickens as
distrustful of society at large but faithful to the power of human love (3); she says his
fiction includes “a continuing fantasy about the ideal, the unconditional virtue” and
demonstrates “a division between the society he rejects and the humanity he believes in”
(4). This “unconditional virtue” may well be the foundation for Dickens’s interest in
children. As the representatives of society’s future virtuousness, children are inherently
deserving of its protection.
Besides being representative of societal conditions at large, and a culture’s future,
children are furthermore imperative to the human rights argument because they are the
embodiment of innocence; still untainted, youths represent the wholesome peak for which
all members of society should strive. Dickens is certainly an advocate of children being

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an example to their corrupted adult counterparts and society at large; as Hardy notes, the
“isolated purity” of the children in Dickens’s novels “is stressed by the darkness and
twistedness of the surrounding society” (5). This holds especially true in The Old
Curiosity Shop where Nell’s innate innocence is continually contrasted against the
chaotic world in which she lives. The most notable example of this is the curiosity shop
itself, which serves as Nell’s home in the beginning of the novel and is described at odds
with her own delicate appearance as being “one of those receptacles for old and curious
things” haphazardly stored “in odd corners” (4). Additionally, the misshapen figure of
Mr. Quilp (“so low in stature as to be quite a dwarf, though his head and face were large
enough for the body of a giant”) is a grotesque foil to Nell’s youth and beauty (22).
Today, much of the social rhetoric is committed to condemning the recruitment of
children into various militia forces and the trafficking of young boys and girls as sex and
labor slaves. However, children are important to human rights arguments also because
their suffering is ultimately the responsibility of their caretaker, society at large; whereas
adults must oftentimes take responsibility for their own miserable situations, children
remain innocent and therefore blameless for the problems that befall them. For example,
while Nell’s grandfather is accountable for his own poverty, she is merely a victim of the
circumstances that he has created for the both of them through gambling. According to
Hardy, Dickens’s child characters are “incorruptible,” “made of different stuff from the
rest of the world,” and virtuous “beyond contamination” (6). Whereas adult characters
like Fagin or Ralph Nickleby often prove corruptible and weak on the moral scale,
children consistently demonstrate their ethical strength.

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As this paper intends to study Charles Dickens’s focus on the position of children
and child-like figures in society in order to prove that he had an early awareness of what
we today understand to be inherent rights of individuals, it will be necessary to explore
contemporary notions of human rights, specifically in relation to children, and compare
those ideals with the social principles that Dickens seems to promote. According to
Micheline R. Ishay, “human rights are held by individuals simply because they are part of
the human species. They are rights shared equally, regardless of sex, age, race,
nationality, and economic background” (3). Today, the field of human rights covers a
broad spectrum of issues and seeks to address violations against the inherent rights of
people across the globe. These rights, according to the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights that was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948, include
equality of dignity and an endowment of conscience for all mankind in their interactions
with one another. Furthermore, the Declaration establishes expectations against slavery of
any kind, as well as promoting general hopes for free education, limited working hours
and reasonable compensation for labor, and freedom from oppression under any
circumstance. These expectations are particularly relevant to the protection and education
of children in society, and it is the violations of these rights that I intend to examine and
apply to Dickens’s characters. Dickens seems to have had an early intuition for what
would become a pervading social agenda regarding the inherent rights of children in
society.
I do not intend, in the course of this paper, to examine the full spectrum of abuse
and neglect that afflicted Victorian children in England. I do, however, hope to use

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specific textual examples in order to suggest the pervasive social problem of which
Dickens exhibited awareness. The examples discussed are merely proof that children
require the protection of society at large more so than any other group; Dickens explores
this glaring truth in several of his plots. Dickens’s novels certainly suggest an awareness
of human rights violations against children (although the term itself was not used in his
time as it is today). Child characters pervade his novels and frequently appear as
representatives of Victorian society’s failures. The way in which Dickens uses his novels
to criticize society’s relationship to children is by situating his characters within the
particular environment he aims to condemn. For the purposes of this paper, I intend to
outline these various scenarios according to the previously-mentioned expectations about
what human rights are. In so doing, I will elaborate the human rights violations that
afflict Dickens’s child characters, thereby proving his early notion of society’s
responsibility toward children in general.
Since 1948, the terminology of human rights has become mainstream and is
frequently used to represent a variety of complaints against a variety of apparent
perpetrators, from warlords in the Congo to American legislators. However, the
fundamental ideals of human rights are not new. Although the term itself has only
recently developed to incorporate specific definitions, there has existed for centuries the
notion that individuals are guaranteed certain rights and that society at large has a certain
level of responsibility toward those rights. Indeed, Dickens seems to have had some
notion of these ideals long before they were explicated as an international document; his

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novels frequently focus on the struggles that arise in his characters’ lives because their
rights are taken for granted by society at large.
In particular, contemporary definitions of human rights are inherently concerned
with the protection of children; likewise, Dickens’s novels express a specific concern for
neglected and abused youth. According to Amnesty International, an organization
committed to the enforcement of human rights practices, children across the world “are
denied their rights…miss out on their education…are recruited into armed forces” and are
subjected to many other infringements upon their person. Yet as Judith Blau and Alberto
Moncada note, “the basic principles [of human rights] can be found in all religious
traditions…as well as in all philosophical traditions” (3). Therefore, it is not surprising
that issues surrounding the rights of children have been addressed and practices criticized
from an early time period, including the era in which Dickens was writing.
Dickens and Charity
The Victorian era paralleled the birth of the industrial age. This time period is
specifically categorized by the consolidation of capitalism, the development of the
factory system, and the growth of the middle class. Yet with these new implementations,
and the growing desire for a system of endless accumulation of capital, there inevitably
arose glaring exploitations: against the poor, against the sick, against women, and,
particularly, against children. British textile mills, for example, thrived on the labor of
pauper children, under the pretense of ensuring that they “could be economically self-
sufficient from the age of five” (Rivoli 95, 99).

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In the Victorian era, understandings of that which are now considered inherent
ideals in the human rights agenda were heavily influenced by Christian tenets for charity.
There existed also, even among secular Victorians, an inclination favoring philanthropy.
However, these notions of charity and philanthropy were incomplete in what we today
regard as necessary inclusions to human rights awareness. According to Richard D.
Altick, “it was the Evangelical compassion which kept the spirit of social reform alive in
the decades when political economists rejected it on the ground that suffering was a
divine arrangement for keeping the numbers of the poor in check” (179); humanitarian
concerns led to the establishment of hundreds of philanthropic organizations (180).
Victorian Evangelicals believed that “public morality depended on personal virtue” and
associated with that belief a certain level of responsibility toward helping the less
fortunate (181).
Fundamentally, however, the Victorian efforts of societal assistance were based
out of a kind of “civilizing mission,” in which they hoped to tame the apparently savage
wretches that loitered in the poorer parts of town (Goodlad 594); charitable efforts were
not made out of any feeling of inherent responsibility toward the weak, nor in recognition
of any fundamental standard of life. The Jos of the world were not regarded as having
any inherent entitlement to anything. This point is made clear when Mr. Chadband, a
pretentious and verbose man of religion, encounters Jo and charges him with being “in a
state of darkness…a state of obscurity…a state of sinfulness…[and] a state of bondage,”
but makes no real effort to assist Jo in rising out of his physical, mental, and spiritual
poverty (268). Rather, in the course of spreading their good will, Victorian Evangelicals

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expected to spread the message of good living; they fell under some criticism for this,
however. Dickens, in particular, deplored the individual behaviors of Evangelicals for
their excessiveness, their ignorance, their hypocrisy, their “moral vanity”, and their
general “attempts to suppress the innocent pleasures of others” (Pope 31). He condemns
the Chadbands of society for their self-important demeanors, stating that, should they
“[remove] their own persons from the light,” they would prove much more able to assist
figures like Jo (357). Taking this into account, I think it is important to address the fact
that, while Dickens’s awareness of human rights and societal violations against the
helpless – notably, children – may have been aroused by the efforts of Christian charity
during his time, the author’s works suggest a departure from the methods of Victorian
Evangelicals, even as they attempted to take responsibility for the overall well-being of
society. In Bleak House, for example, Dickens clearly represents his disdain for Mrs.
Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle, women “who did a little and made a great deal of noise
[opposed to] people who did a great deal and made no noise at all” (101). Indeed, Mrs.
Jellyby is introduced in a chapter titled “Telescopic Philanthropy,” reiterating her
inability to see anything “nearer than Africa,” which for Dickens is a great waste of effort
when there is so much need for social uplift at home in England (37); Dickens had little
patience for Victorian philanthropists’ efforts to “civilize” the natives of far-away
regions, instead believing that human rights efforts should focus on the bettering of
English social conditions. However, even those philanthropists who did focus their
efforts locally were a source of vexation to Dickens, because he found their methods
misguided and inadequate. The character of Mrs. Pardiggle is an absolute satire on the

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apparently well-meaning Evangelical that was so rife in Victorian England: Dickens
describes her as demonstrating a “great show of moral determination,” which proves
entirely useless to the families she visits (107). In particular, she visits a brickmaker’s
family and gives them a bible to read, disregarding the fact that the whole family is
illiterate, and furthermore has little use for Mrs. Pardiggle’s “inexorable moral
[policing]” when their life is “nat’rally dirty…nat’rally onwholesome” and fully devoid
of basic comforts (108).
Dickens’s concern for society extends beyond the kind of religious-based,
fervored philanthropy that prevailed among Victorians at his time; rather, he recognizes
that despite broad charitable efforts, unfortunate and neglected individuals continued to
suffer at the hands of society. Characters like Jo from Bleak House, Nell from The Old
Curiosity Shop, Smike and Madeleine Bray from Nicholas Nickleby, Little Dorrit, and
Oliver Twist demonstrate Dickens’s particular criticism of the exploitation and neglect of
children. As Peter d’Alroy Jones notes in The Christian Socialist Revival, the average
Victorian regarded the poor and helpless of society as “little less foreign than the
Andamian islanders” (79). Conversely, Dickens seems to represent Immanuel Kant’s
notion that, “a man who avoids other men because he can find no pleasure in them,
though he indeed wishes them well” is to be the subject of criticism (118). Dickens seems
particularly concerned with society’s responsibility toward the helpless, and seems to
reflect Kant’s assertions that men are obligated to love and respect one another, and to
help one another when they can. What we see in Dickens, therefore, may very well be
described as the emergence of a generally secular understanding of human rights.

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Labor and Work
Children are important to the subject of human rights for several different reasons.
Primarily, they are important because they too are human beings and, according to human
rights thought, they therefore deserve the same basic opportunities and protections as
everyone else. As James R. Kincaid points out in his essay “Dickens and the Construction
of the Child,” “we got into bad trouble when we decided…that the child is a different
species” from adults (Jacobson 29); Kincaid argues that the Victorian child was
constructed much like any “othered” individual and kept separate from the societal “self”
in order to justify unequal treatment. Throughout history, children have often been
exploited in order to advance their adult counterparts in some way. For example, in 19th
century England, “the first wave of the industrial revolution employed pauper [and
orphan] children who were theoretically under the care of the mill owners. Parish
authorities were glad to reduce their expenses through this practice, and mill owners were
happy to access this abundant supply of cheap labor” (McIntyre 136, emphasis added). A
criticism of this practice is seen in Nicholas Nickleby and is the foundation for Dickens’s
novel Oliver Twist, in which the exploitation of child labor is endemic.
In Nicholas Nickleby, the most glaring attack on human rights in regard to child
labor is Smike. The character Smike is “nearly [a man] by years” but possesses the
mentality, physicality, and emotionality of a young boy due to the years of suffering he
has endured at the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Squeers (citation). Kept as a servant in
Dotheboys Hall, Smike receives even worse treatment than the pupils who live there,
being abused, overworked, and malnourished by the complacent family that keeps him.

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He is expected to suffer the commands and the beatings of the Squeerses without
resistance or complaint.
Smike lives in conditions bordering on slavery. He has neither limited working
hours nor does he receive reasonable compensation of any kind from the Squeerses for
his labor. Smike is a servant at all hours of the day, is expected to perform every
unreasonably straining task, and is additionally abused in the process. His so-called
compensation for service involves room and board consisting of a cold floor to sleep on
and the most meager scraps of food required for subsistence.
The language Dickens uses in relation to the Squeers family at once incites both
ridicule and abhorrence on the part of the reader. He describes Mr. and Mrs. Squeers with
sarcasm and their daughter Fanny with bemusement. Yet Dickens is not only blaming the
individuals of the Squeers family for Smike’s plight; rather, it is ultimately the fault of
the larger society, which allows an establishment like Dotheboys Hall to operate without
review or restriction. Like Jo, Smike is representative of the larger Victorian society’s
willingness to ignore and neglect the impoverished citizens of England. Dickens utilizes
these characters to demonstrate that such neglect is a gross violation of the basic
responsibility of society to protect its children.
Oliver Twist experiences a similar situation to Smike in terms of long working
hours and inesteemable recompense. Yet the horrors of laboring that Oliver experiences
are almost more shocking to Dickens and his readers because, first, Oliver is a much
younger child than Smike (who is almost a grown man) and second, because Oliver’s
experience is a much more systematic one. At eight years old, Oliver is essentially

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farmed out to a factory house and forced to work at ropes, untwisting old fibers so that
they may be recycled. The working day is not only long for Oliver and his fellows, but
the work itself proves tedious and arduous. Dickens exemplifies his condemnation of
Oliver’s situation most poignantly when he decries, “What a noble illustration of the
tender laws of England! They let the paupers go to sleep!” (13).
Oliver’s payment for services rendered is none. According to the Parish
authorities, he and the other factory orphans should appreciate the fact that they are being
taught a trade (which benefits the Board more than them) and are provided with three
meals of gruel each day. Yet in what is perhaps one of the most classic scenes in
literature, when Oliver requests to have his bowl refilled with some of the excess gruel,
he is beaten with a ladle and his imminent death by hanging is exclaimed indignantly by
the overseer (15).
The issues of non-systemic child labor are also revealed in Oliver Twist. The
Dodger, Charley Bates, and Nancy are all exploited by Fagin’s greed; rather than doing
honest work, or even stealing, himself, Fagin utilizes the cheap and manageable labor of
children to satisfy his own desired lifestyle. Neither the boys nor Nancy are very much
rewarded for their trouble, other than to be provided with meals and a shanty place to
live.
A major element of the modern human rights movement is to ensure that workers,
adults and children alike, are neither subjected to extenuating working conditions nor
denied proper reimbursement for their time and labor. For this purpose, human rights
organizations around the world make the effort to standardize what is considered

14. “reasonable” working hours and compensation. Dickens was no stranger to this idea; the
nineteenth century was privy to social movements and legislation which focused
specifically on the issue of labor conditions. His novels, however, demonstrate Dickens’s
particular concern over working conditions, as well as the rights of working children. The
language he uses throughout this text in order to make his accusations is particularly
sardonic. When Dickens seeks to depict the mental attitudes of authority figures, he
brandishes a very evident sort of style. For example, when describing the conditions of
the child workhouses, Dickens states that the Parish authorities were “in ecstasies” when
their young inmates began to show signs of starvation and overwork (14).
Sexual Dangers
In addition to the industrial expansion and consequent economic changes, Victorian
England saw a shift in the social norms as well, in particular the meaning of sexuality,
with definitions of sex becoming “disengaged from procreation” (Walkowitz 6). This
development led to the expansion and development of the sex trade, including child
prostitution. This is a crucial comparison to the modern human rights discussion,
because, although the sexual slave trade continues to exist, legislators world-wide have
failed to establish enforceable laws against it, much as English society seems to have
been ignorant, or else horrifically tolerant, of child sex slaves. In 1885, William Thomas
Stead became ardently concerned with “the traffic of girls in London’s vice emporiums”
(Walkowitz 81) and published an article in the Pall Mall Gazette, entitled “The Maiden
Tribute to Modern Babylon,” which condemned “the sale, purchase, and violation of
children; the procuration of virgins; and the international slave trade in girls,” all of
which had been occurring for decades, and were issues of which Dickens himself would

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have been aware when he wrote his novels. Dickens addresses the problem of child
prostitution in Oliver Twist with the character Nancy, a young woman who is sixteen or
seventeen years old. Although Dickens never explicitly states that Nancy is a prostitute, it
seems clear that her “living” has progressed from the mere thievery that Fagin recruited
her for as a small child to the marketing of her own body; she says “the dirty streets are
[her] home…day and night, day and night, till [she dies]” (133).
Nancy is, perhaps, the most violated character in Oliver Twist; she is not only
disregarded by society and oppressed by her impoverished situation, but she is
furthermore tyrannized by Fagin and Bill Sikes, who use her for their own selfish ends
and have no consideration for either her person or her opinion as a person. It is their
inconsideration and disrespect of Nancy that ultimately leads to Bill Sikes killing her.
Furthermore, Nancy’s death is yet another indictment by Dickens’s of Victorian society’s
negligence of poor children. Had she been properly cared for by the society that was
responsible for her, Nancy would never have been exposed to the life of a prostitute, nor
suffered a death which, like her life, was irrelevant to the average Victorian.
Although Nancy is Dickens’s only criticism of child prostitution, he addresses and
criticizes the various exploitations of girls and young women repeatedly throughout his
novels. As one example, the threat of the sexual exploitation of children is seen in
Nicholas Nickleby, when Madeleine Bray’s father essentially barters her to Mr. Gride in
hopes of securing his release from the debtors prison. Mr. Gride is understood to be
significantly older than Madeleine, older perhaps than even her father, and regards her
with lustful “base expressions” and “leers” (citation).

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Similarly, in The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell’s “fear and distrust” of Mr. Quilp
manifests as a seriously sexualized danger when the dwarf petitions the young girl to “be
[his] number two; [his] second; [his] Mrs. Quilp,” despite being already married to one
very young woman (45). Dickens later expands upon Mr. Quilp’s threat to Nell when he
describes in a most disturbing and grotesque way his invitation for Nell to sit upon his
knee, his reference to her as “chubby, rosy, [and] cosy,” and his eventual intrusion into
her own bedroom, which he makes his own, describing the bed as “much about [his]
size” (73, 86).
Educational Opportunities
Modern human rights thought is particularly interested in children’s right to
education, and Dickens seems to exemplify a certain level of understanding in regard to
the importance of educating children. The issue of education is most obvious in Nicholas
Nickleby, Oliver Twist, and Bleak House.
A major criticism made by modern human rights theorists is that children are
frequently denied their right to education. In Nicholas Nickleby, Dickens depicts a very
specific scenario in which children who are supposed to be gaining knowledge are
prohibited from actually acquiring any knowledge. At Dotheboys Hall, a so-called school
for young boys, Mr. Squeers acts as the schoolmaster, yet deliberately fails to teach his
pupils anything. Instead of instructing, Mr. Squeers violates the boys’ right to education
(as well as their parents’ trust that they are learning something) by using them as
common laborers around his house, as well as stealing their mail and gifts sent from
home, physically abusing them, and starving them to cut down on boarding costs.

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Similarly, the title character Oliver Twist suffers from the parsimonious attitudes
of the Parish system, in which orphaned children are farmed out to mills and factories in
order to learn a trade and ultimately earn their keep. Early in the novel, Oliver Twist is
introduced to the mechanical system of the Parish, which denies children not only their
youth, but also their opportunity to learn more than factory skills and perhaps develop
their mental faculties so they might better their own positions in the world.
The importance of education pervades Oliver Twist; Dickens condemns the denial
of education by demonstrating that uneducated children are vulnerable to the criminal
influences of immoral recruiters like Fagin and Bill Sikes, who prey on young children in
order to train them as thieves. This “school” of crime provides a contrasting image to
traditional social learning. Additionally, Dickens suggests a connection between morality
and education when the kindly Mr. Brownlow takes Oliver in and introduces the boy to
his library and tells him “you shall read them, if you behave well…how should you like
to grow up a clever man…?” (107). Mr. Brownlow’s various attentions to Oliver,
including his intention to educate him, are influential in encouraging Oliver’s natural
inclination toward morality and incorruptibility.
Finally, Dickens condemns the lack of education in Bleak House with the afore-
mentioned character Jo. Jo has presumably grown up on the streets and is repeatedly
described, and indeed describes himself, as knowing “nothink.” Yet Jo’s ignorance has
nothing to do with his own inclinations; Dickens suggests that should he have been given
the opportunity to learn, Jo would have been very interested in doing so:
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets,
unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of

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those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners
of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and
to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have
the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind
and dumb! […] perhaps Jo does think, at odd times, what does it all mean,
and if it means anything to anybody, how come it means nothing to me?
(218).
With this passage, Dickens provides his reader with access to Jo’s mind and perspective,
demonstrating the pitiful and sympathetic state of ignorance in which he lives. In Jo’s
case, Dickens severely blames society at large for his lack of education. Jo is constantly
told that he “has no business here,” yet notes himself that he is “here somehow…and
everybody overlooked [him] until [he] became the creature that [he is]!” (218).
Dickens’s criticism seems to suggest that, instead of overlooking Jo, society has a
responsibility to him, and to his rights as a child and as a human being, and therefore
should have furthermore taken responsibility for educating him.
General Oppression
The final notion of human rights theory that this paper aims to address is general
oppression of children, and this point is perhaps the most extensive in terms of
exemplifying Dickens’s apparently early concept of what would develop almost a century
after he lived into a global social agenda. According to the Oxford English Dictionary
(OED), the term “oppression” has been most commonly used to mean a “distressing
sense of constriction” or “prolonged cruel or unjust treatment…[or] tyranny.” Also
according to the OED, Dickens himself utilized the word to signify a “pressure, weight,
[or] burden.” The child characters of Dickens’s novels are certainly burdened by their
oppressive situations, and it is this fact that most strongly suggests Dickens’s

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expectations of social responsibility, particularly toward children, and his apparent hope
to unburden them from their afflictions.
In Nicholas Nickleby, there are several young characters who suffer under some
kind of personal or societal oppression. Smike, of course, is a glaring example of this, but
as his trials have already been discussed at length in a previous section of this paper, I
will focus now on Nicholas himself and his sister Kate.
Although Nicholas generally rises victorious by the end of the novel, it is not
without first experiencing a series of oppressions by other individuals. In particular, his
uncle Ralph Nickleby, attempts to suppress his behavior repeatedly, first dictating what
sort of job Nicholas should hold, and later attempting to completely ostracize him.
Kate, too, suffers from the overbearing nature of Ralph, and in many ways suffers
much more at his hand than Nicholas. As she remains in London while her brother goes
away to work, Kate must interact with Ralph on a much more regular basis and is
therefore consistently burdened by his direct and his indirect attempts to oppress her. For
example, Kate, similar to Nicholas, has her position in society determined by her uncle
when he finds employment for her at the milliner’s. While the general intention is to
assist and provide for the newly-impoverished Nicklebys, Ralph permits Kate no agency
in positioning herself. Later on, he exploits her further by requesting that she attend a
dinner meeting with him and his major business partners. This not only subjects Kate to
discomfort and ridicule, but she is also sexually threatened by the brash Sir Mulberry
Hawk. This situation exemplifies the varying degree of oppressiveness, and how gender
as well as youth can play an important role.

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In Little Dorrit, the title character’s situation proves exceedingly different from
many of Dickens’s other child characters. Little Dorrit has lived her entire life inside the
Marshalsea debtors prison, in which her father has been an inmate for twenty-one years.
Although she is permitted to enter and exit the prison as she will, to go earn money
needleworking for Mrs. Clenham, the so-called Child of the Marshalsea is essentially as
much a prisoner as her father.
“With no earthly friend to help her, or so much as to see her,” Little Dorrit has
lived out her entire childhood and begun her young womanhood with the consistent
burden of keeping her father calm and comfortable. Additionally, she worries about her
extravagant, indifferent older sibling and often pays for their debts, as well as “over and
above her other daily cares…[having] upon her the care of preserving the genteel fiction”
of the family’s high social standing and her own consequent idleness. Because Mr. Dorrit
refuses to acknowledge that, in losing his fortune, he has also ruined and lost his
aristocratic title, he insists that his children should not be seen “earning their bread”
(citation). Therefore, the efforts that Little Dorrit makes to assist her family and keep
them somewhat monetarily secure must be performed in secret.
Little Dorrit’s entrapment and oppression is not so much a physical one (although
that plays a part); rather, she is more psychologically oppressed by the idea that she must
protect her family, despite their repetitive irresponsibility. In Little Dorrit’s case, Dickens
seems to be making a broader statement about human rights, highlighting his character’s
gender as well as her youth and condemning society’s expectations for her self-sacrifice.
Mr. Dorrit in particular enforces this sentiment with co-dependent professions that he

21. Stubbs 21.
cannot do without his youngest daughter for any extended amount of time and demands
that she not leave him alone. These factors combined prohibit Little Dorrit from living
her own life, and she possesses almost no agency to make decisions for herself. Even
when she encounters Arthur Clenham, who becomes a great benefactor to her family and
who interests her romantic affection, Little Dorrit is initially forced to succumb to her
father and siblings’ desire that she avoid him, especially once their own situation changes
for the better.
Little Dorrit forgoes favoring her own desires in order to satisfy those of others.
Her family is particularly oppressive of her, and this plays out in two stages, which
parallel the two volumes of the text. First, Little Dorrit is more or less confined to the
same prison her father lives in, despite having committed no crime. She has no other
place to go, and is kept there even more regularly than necessary because Mr. Dorrit
hates to be alone and therefore prevents her from going out as much as he can. When Mr.
Dorrit is finally released from the Marshalsea, and his family is returned to some level of
social dignity, he and his other two children continue to oppress Little Dorrit by dictating
the persons she may contact and interact with (or not).
Dickens’s careful treatment of his child characters’ situations is evidence for the
fact that he was aware of the various forms of oppression and the way in which it may
afflict children in Victorian English society. What’s more, Dickens uses his characters’
plight to criticize Victorian society’s negligence of a child’s right to agency. Smike and
Little Dorrit are particular examples of this, as their futures, and ultimately their release
from both physical and psychological captivity, are determined by outside actors. They

22. Stubbs 22.
themselves have no means for removing themselves from their enslavement and must
therefore rely upon the eventual benevolence that is shown to them by Nicholas Nickleby
and his family, and Arthur Clenham, respectively.
Finally, the two most significant examples of oppressed child figures in Dickens’s
novels are perhaps Jo from Bleak House and Nell from The Old Curiosity Shop. Because
these characters suffer very similar sorts of oppression, it seems useful to the purposes of
this paper to analyse them together. Many of Jo’s sufferings have been elaborated on in
the introduction, yet it remains to examine the full purpose that these sufferings serve in
proving Dickens’s viewpoint. The tragedy of both Jo and Nell are not their deaths, but the
terrible neglect and violations they experience beforehand.
Jo is described throughout the novel as being constantly “hustled and jostled and
moved on” and while there are a few characters who demonstrate kindness toward him
(Mr. Snagsby and Captain Hawdon), most only deign to interact with Jo in order that he
perform a task for them, or else provide information. For Dickens, using a person,
particularly a child, for one’s own purposes, and otherwise neglecting and discarding
him, is the ultimate exploitation. He makes this evident with Jo, as well as with Nell,
who, though sincerely loved by most that encounter her, is nevertheless frequently used
for their own advantage. In particular, Nell’s grandfather, despite being motivated in his
wrongdoing by a desire to make money and therefore advance Nell in society, ultimately
exploits her love for him. Because she is a comfort to him, Nell’s grandfather refuses to
place her in a home or school where she would be better taken care of than with him.
Their homelessness and the extensive journey they take together is the result of his

23. Stubbs 23.
gambling and debt, and the strain that such a trek puts on Nell’s childish frame proves not
only exhaustive, but fatal.
Conclusion
As this paper shows, Dickens definitely had an early awareness of the notions that
we today associate with human rights thought; in particular, he had an advanced concern
for the position and treatment of children in society. While some critics may suggest that
Dickens’s career relied upon the suffering individuals of Victorian English culture, and
that his use of their plight as melodramatic fodder for his novels merely panders to an
audience seeking to balm their own consciences with fictional sympathy, I argue that
Dickens was legitimately interested in the issues he portrays and therefore utilized his
novels as a personal soapbox. It is, of course, legitimate to question whether or not, for
example, Dickens develops the suffering of a character like Nell to the same, excitably
horrific entertainment level of a Gothic novel, while failing to offer any definitive answer
to the social crises that he is analysing.
However, although I agree that Dickens fails to develop fully an alternative to the
system he condemns, he does seem to relate an advanced opinion of society’s
responsibility towards itself. In his books, the sufferings of his child characters, and the
human rights violations they experience, are remedied by the actions of one or a few
individuals. In Nicholas Nickleby, the benevolent saviors are the Cheeryble brothers and
in Oliver Twist, the young hero is rescued by the kind patron Brownlow. Similar
characters appear in the other novels as well: Esther and Mr. Jarndyce in Bleak House,
Mr. Clenham in Little Dorrit, and Mr. Humphrey and the schoolmaster who takes in Nell

24. Stubbs 24.
in The Old Curiosity Shop. While, as Humphry House notes in The Dickens World, the
benevolence of these moral characters provide “no satisfactory link between the evil[s of
society] and the cure,” they are “clearly meant to be representatives of an improved moral
order,” which Dickens aims to establish as an ethical example for which members of
society should strive. At the essence of his work, Dickens echoes the ideologies of Kant,
who suggested that if the individuals of society could morally improve their selves by
taking responsibility for their fellow man, the conditions of society at large would
improve significantly. Love and selflessness in relation to others was a very Kantean
ideal, and Dickens exemplifies a kind of “moral art” of fiction by demonstrating the
“difficulty and complexity of giving, loving, and growing out from self in an unjust,
commercialized, and de-naturing society” (Hardy 3). Dickens’s focus on children in
particular suggests that he did have hope for the moral advancement of Victorian society
in the future, so long as the inherent rights and dignity of people (including children) did
not continue to be ignored. Despite the limitations and prejudices of his time, Dickens
exemplifies an ideology consistent with modern human rights thought, particularly in
relation to children.

25. Stubbs 25.
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