찰스 디킨스의 도시화에 대한 인식의 변화

Abstract

Charles Dickens is no doubt an urban writer. It is no exaggeration to say that he created the London of the prosperous Victorian England in his novels as we know it now. Through his novels, we see what really happened to the people who lived in one of the most rapidly changing ages in human history. One of the major changes of his time was urbanization that the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th century had prompted throughout the country. In Dickens's novels, we can find out how his contemporaries lived through urbanization and how he thought about it. It is true that urbanization enhanced the disorderly state of the city; at the same time, it left the lower classes of the city with no decent space to live in and pushed them more and more into the city's crooked corners. Or they simply had to move outside of the city. The social issues in Dickens's novels are, in one way or another, all related to the living conditions of the poor. At the beginning of his career as a novelist, Dickens both feels proud of the prosperity that urbanization brought about and criticizes its negative effects upon the poor as well as lamenting over the loss of the conventional atmosphere of the 'good old days.' He must have thought at this time that urbanization would have its limits, still allowing the most English lifestyle in a rural space, as is testified in Oliver Twist where Oliver and Rose could manage to live peacefully in a country house fairly unaffected by the crowded city life. In Dombey and Son that began to be serialized in 1846, however, he shows a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward urbanization. After the outbreak of cholera at the end of the 1840s, however, Dickens's idea of urbanization and its ensuing environmental pollutions changed. In Bleak House, the whole world is full of fog and mud, and no one, regardless of his or her social status, can be free from them. Unlike in his earlier novels, the heroine is no longer able to stay away from the reality that is foggy and muddy. In other words, Dickens argues here that the living conditions of the poor are not just the matter of the poor but of all people in the end as environment affects people of all classes and different ages.