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274 The nineteenth century
Smollett, whom he acknowledged as one of his masters. The vein of
good-natured comedy, well-observed character, humorous use of class
and dialect difference, and ‘traditional’ values will be found repeatedly
in Dickens’s work after The Pickwick Papers. A Christmas Carol (1843)
is the high point of one of these trends, bringing together a touch of
the Gothic, the clash between wealth and poverty, and the sentimental
assertion of fireside and family values. This is the happy ending:
‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim, the last of all.
However, a more serious tone soon enters Dickens’s works, as he
begins to play on his readers’ awareness of social problems and the
growing conscience of the age. Oliver Twist (1837–38) highlighted the
problems of poor city children who after the Poor Law Act of 1833
ended up in the workhouse, or at the mercy of crooks like Fagin and
Bill Sykes. One of the most memorable images in the novel is when
Oliver asks the workhouse master for more to eat:
He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and
spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:
‘Please, Sir, I want some more.’
This is the city as portrayed in Blake’s London, rather than
Wordsworth’s Sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge. In many of
Dickens’s novels he portrays the diversity and disorder of the rapidly
growing capital. The suffering of children continues in the Yorkshire
schools described in Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39); money emerges as
the main influence behind the action here, a role it continues to play
in late novels of the century. Sentiment takes over in The Old Curiosity
Shop (1840–41) with its heroine, Little Nell, the epitome of the helpless
Victorian female victim. The death of Little Nell is the climax of the
sentimental trend started by Henry Mackenzie in his novel The Man of
Feeling. However, the change in taste between 1841 and the end of
the century is wittily underlined in Oscar Wilde’s comment on the
lachrymose death scene: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the
death of Little Nell without laughing.’