Victorian Age

Dickens ' Victorian Critique of Church and State

There is not much question in a look at his career 's work , that Charles Dickens was by his nature a harsh social critic . He would often make his characters morally objectionable in to demonstrate the ills of society and would take an especially great interest in showing the iniquities of Church and State . In the deeply unequal England of the Victorian era , Dickens felt that he saw a lot of suffering , a great many people in need and a visible disgust of the rich toward

the poor . The fact that these conditions had associated so closely with the premise of God and Crown had drawn out in critics such as Dickens as sharp distaste for the British institution girding both . That is why so many of his works centered on the relationship of the rich and poor , separated as such by the unwelcome permeation of authority of the former over the latter . The labor conditions Dickens explores in Hard Times through such figures as Stephen are contrasted sharply by the life of decadence and sanctimony denoting the figure of Josiah Bounderby . Clearly the figure through who Dickens channels the greatest pitch of protest , there is a clear hostility toward the hypocrisy and meanness which allows Bounderby to prevail over the poor of Coketown with a divinely entitled and self-declared superiority . It is here that Dickens captures the Victorian era 's undercurrent of resentment of the exploitation of God and Church for the interests of rendering selective such universal entitlements as faith and justice

In Bounderby , we are given the opportunity to view the justice system in Dickens ' time as something principally founded on inequality determining a process which is governed by an aristocratic jurisdiction over that which deemed righteous , just and moral . All of these concepts emerge in Bounderby , and especially in a notable encounter with Stephen suggest the most demonstrably inappropriate misuse of religious principles

In Hard Times , published in 1854 , Dickens shows that he is specifically interested in dealing with a current problem of labor abuse . He draws a deeply negative picture of the rationalist political movement with which Bounderby may be identified . This was a powerful movement at the time in England . Rationality was focused on facts , which Dickens believed were used to give strict control over education , values and even creativity . This would impact the making of religion and justice too The chief characterization of Bounderby captures this points exceedingly well , remarking that there was a moral infection of claptrap in him Strangers , modest enough elsewhere , started up at dinners in Coketown and boasted in quite a rampant way , of Bounderby . They made him out to be the Royal arms , the Union-Jack , Magna Charta , John Bull , Habeas Corpus , the Bill of Rights , an Englishman 's house is his castle , Church and State , and God Save the Queen , all put together (52 ) The declaration , clearly satirical in its delivery , is theless a premise upon which we will find...