A Survey Of The Humanism Reflected In Charles Dickens’ Children Characters

Charles Dickens is not only one of the greatest representatives of English criticalrealists, but also a great humanist. A characteristic of Dickens’ works is its observationand writing from children’s perspective. Based on Marxist literary criticism this essayconnects his children characters with humanism through the perspective of Marxistliterary criticism.Marxist literary criticism provides an approach to analyze the contradictions ofcapitalism. Georg Lukcas, the major representative of Marxist literary criticism, claimedthat literature should not only reflect the world but also have to distort reality in order torepresent the truth about society. This essay employs Lukacs’ reflection theory asanalyzing framework to carry out a detailed study of Dickens’ children characters. Inthis thesis, Dickens’ three novels Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and GreatExpectations from his three creation periods are chosen by the author, since these threeworks all concerned with deserted children and widely represent Dickens’ view aboutchildren’ life. By comparing Charles Dickens’ own childhood with his belovedcharacters in his novels, this paper attempts to reveal how Dickens’ works reflect theabnormal society at the Victorian age, what’s the resource of his humanism and how hislife experiences on influence the creation of the heroes in his novels.This thesis begins with its explanation of the significance and content, and thenintroduces previous studies at home and aboard on humanism of Dickens’ novels.Chapter three explains a framework of this essay, Marxist literary criticism.Subsequently, the body part analyzes how Dickens’ humanism reflected in his threeworks respectively based on Lukcas’ reflection theory and history background of Victorian period. At last, this paper discusses the implications of Dickens’ humanismand his limitations.Based on these investigations, this paper concludes that Dickens’ reflection andcritiques of the ugliness of that time empower his critical realism with humanism. Beinghuman is the core spirit of Charles Dickens’ humanism, of which morality is the majorcontent. By presenting the pictures of the lowest people of Britain society, Dickens gavevoice to those who had no voice, at the same time he established a link between politicsand literature with his social commentary. That’s Marxist literary criticism aims to do, toreflect the world truly, and to change the world eventually.Through the analysis of the humanism, it can help the readers better to understandDickens’ humanism from different perspective.