Education and Social Mobility Aspects in Dickens's Nicholas Nickelby Essay

Education and Social Mobility Aspects in dickenss Nicholas Nickelby - Essay Example dickens obviously was happy that his attack on the kind of schoolmasters of the time typified by Squeers had hit its mark, and here we establish an instance of an author who has found social authority. After the success of Pickwick Papers, Dickens was secure in the association that he could become an established writer, but that he wanted to become a novelist was decided at the time of Nicholas Nickleby, as Chesterton so eloquently points outIt must be remembered that before this issue of Nicholas Nickleby his work, made as it was, had non been such as to dedicate him seriously or irrevocably to the writing of novels. He had already written three books and at least two of them are classed among the novels under his name..... the Sketches by Boz, The Pickwick Papers, and Oliver Twist......Had he continued along this line all his books might very well lead been note-books......We might have lost a ll Dickenss novels we might have lost altogether Dickens the novelist....All his books might have been Sketches by Boz. But he did turn away from this, and the turning-point is Nicholas Nickleby. (Chesterton, 1911)Thus, Nicholas Nickleby became the ... struggle he had to make to reach eminence as a writer, his work also became a voice that decried all that was ill with education and the issues involving social mobility during his time, and from his popular activities in both these areas, we can see that he realises that power and authority, and wields it consciously in his writing. As Cairns says of Dickens and his contemporaries in his work Figures of Finance Capitalism Writing, Class, and Capital in the Age of Dickens Professional novelists became not only providers of relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and representatives of that middle-class perception and success ..... The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power.... (Cain, 2003)2.1 Personal BackgroundTo understand Dickenss discourse of the issues involving education and social mobility in Victorian society, one needs to understand the influences on him at several(a) periods of his life, and the environment which made him what he was. Born to a genteel family lineage, Dickens had an early encounter with poverty, and coinciding fall in social status. In 1824, when barely twelve, he was taken away from school, separated from his family and packed off to labour in a North London shoe-dye factory as a publication of his fathers financial incompetence. Even though he could escape the squalor within a year owe to a windfall inheritance, the experience he went through during this time was to become a life-defining moment for him. The trials he went through at this factory had a profoundly psychological effect on himIn the entire territory there was not a single boy whom the sensitive Charles could have accepted as a playmate. His own room was a mi serable garret overlooking a damp, malodorous court.