This book is an attempt to reconsider, with utmost seriousness, the major novels of Dickens from the standpoint of his preoccupation with the child’s plight against the backdrop of the industrial revolution and the complex social fabric of his times. He himself was a product of an inhuman and insensitive social structure, and had to undergo numerous deprivations and hardships at an early age. There could not have been a better equipped person than him, in terms of experience, to have brought to the notice of the people, the silent sufferings of the future members of the social order. He criticized remorselessly what he saw around him and acquainted the educated sections, who necessarily belonged to the upper echelons of the society, with the Hobbesian (that human life is poor, nasty, brutish and short) conditions of children, and by implication, exhorted them to improve their conditions. There is almost a plethora of critical writings on most of the facets of Dickens’s art and ideas, but this central concern of Dickens the writer certainly merits another in-depth revaluation of his great fictional work. The present book is an endeavour in this direction, and I trust it will make a definite contribution to Dickens criticism.
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