Dickens & Mark Twain as Social Philosophers
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This paper is a study of two of the nineteenth century's most effective social philosophers. Charles Dickens, writing during the Industrial Revolution in England, and Mark Twain, chronicling the equivalent period in America, created tremendously popular fiction that continues to speak to modern audiences. Both were particularly adept at using humor, especially drily ironic wit, to comment on the scenes they painted. In Dickens's Hard Times and Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, these two enduring novelists were at the top of their form. These books create worlds that are vividly alive, fictionalizations of the society each author knew best and observed with a critical eye. They also feature young characters who are wiser, or at least cleverer, than their elders. These youthful commentators allow their authors to look at the world with a child's wisdom and a sly smile of innocence. Twain's is a sunnier perspective, but both writers are able to find considerable humor in some of the darkest places imaginable. They clothe serious observations in wittily entertaining words and are thereby able to get their readers to think carefully about their own times and society. Charles Dickens was born in 1812 in Portsmouth, England. His father was a shipping clerk and struggled throughout Dickens' childhood with poverty. When Charles was 12, his father was sent to debtors' prison, and the memories of these difficult early years growing up in London flavor much of the author'
. . .
ually like one another
. . . If the members of a religious persuasion
built a chapel there--as the members of eighteen
religious persuasions had done--they made it a pious
warehouse of red brick . . . A town so sacred to fact,
and so triumphant in its assertions, of course got on
well? Why no, not quite well. No? Dear me! No (19
20).
Coketown is as much a distinct character as any of its inhabitants, allowing the author to use the town to joke about some of society's more pompous members: "Coketown cast ashes not only on its own head but on the neighbourhood's too--after the manner of those pious persons who do penance for their own sins by putting other people into sackcloth" (237). An important part of his genius as a novelist, in fact, is the gentle but sharply ironic wit which infuses his descriptions of people and places. He has distinct opinions about most of what he sees (whether real or created for the printed page), and he cannot simply present his facts to the reader. He would be as incapable of sitting in the kind of classroom Gradgrind advocates as he is incapable of describing it without letting his vast amusement temper his even greater outrage that such a system should exist to attempt to emasc
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2790
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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