I'm currently reading The Pickwick Papers, Dickens' first novel. He was only 22 at the time and the memory of visiting his father in a debtors' prison would have still been, and probably always was, fresh. Dickens was far from perfect. He obsessed over his wife's sister to the detriment of his marriage. At times his early novels painted unsympathetic stereotypes - the Jew Fagin in Oliver Twist is a clear example of this, but Dickens seems to recognise his error and sought to challenge this stereotype with the character of Riah in his last complete, and my favourite, novel Our Mutual Friend. Riah was seen as something of an apology for Fagin. This idea is fabulously explored in Will Eisner's graphic novel Fagin the Jew.
Despite his flaws, Dickens was someone passionate about social justice for people forgotten and trodden down by the rest of society. We live in a different world today, but we still struggle with creating a society that is equal. This is the bit I read in the bath this morning that got me thinking about this sort of thing:
We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. Not a week passes over our heads, but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some of these men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not relieved by their fellow prisoners.
His dad managed to walk free of the debtors' prison, but the sights Dickens saw when he visited frequently made its way into his fiction. A year before Dickens died, 1869, people were no longer imprisoned for being in debt and it is reasonable to think that Dickens' voice played a small part in bringing about this change in the law. Writing stories is powerful stuff.
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