Dickens

In recent years there has been a revaluation of Dickens's fiction and most critics now consider his late novels to be his greatest achievements. In this essay, Barbara Hardy considers the last seven novels from Bleak House (1857) to his final, unfinished novel, Edwin Drood.

All the later novels, with the exception of A Tale of Two Cities, present a criticism of the institutions of Victorian England. Against a background of riots and mounting fear of...
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In recent years there has been a revaluation of Dickens's fiction and most critics now consider his late novels to be his greatest achievements. In this essay, Barbara Hardy considers the last seven novels from Bleak House (1857) to his final, unfinished novel, Edwin Drood.

All the later novels, with the exception of A Tale of Two Cities, present a criticism of the institutions of Victorian England. Against a background of riots and mounting fear of revolution, Dickens's attack on capitalist society becomes more urgent and passionate, and this urgency creates novels of greater compactness and concentration. As Dickens 'explores more bleakly a bleaker world' there are fewer jokes and the comedy becomes harsher. In these novels of the sociological imagination there is also a developing sense of character, an interest in the inner life of such characters as Louisa in Hard Times, Clennam in Little Dorrit and Pip in Great Expectations.

'The central and continuing interest revealed by all his novels', writes Barbara Hardy, 'is his divided concern with individual love and moral success, on the other hand, and social heartlessness and breakdown on the other', a duality which becomes more pronounced in the later novels. Barbara Hardy (1924-2016) was Professor of English Language and Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. She was the author of The Novels of George Eliot and The Appropriate Form and has edited Middlemarch: Critical Approaches to the Novel and Daniel Deronda.

The bibliography in this essay has been compiled by Dr Michael Slater of Birkbeck College, University of London, at the time, the Editor of The Dickensian. It replaces the earlier bibliography accompanying this essay by Professor Fielding, which remains available in Dickens as part of this series.