Children and the dark side of Charles Dickens

The children of Charles Dickens are immersed in darkness, the central theme of childhood intrinsically linked to negativity and evil. Dickens affords special attention to the many child characters that populate his novels, becoming a sympathetic ‘caregiver’, voicing their suffering and revealing their loneliness and anguish. In so doing, the author lifts them from the anonymity and invisibility they suffer in life. For Dickens, childhood is synonymous with abjection, monstrosity, trauma, sickness, neglect, hunger, ill treatment, guilt, abandonment, ‘orphanhood’, marginalization and death. His vivid heartfelt descriptions sweep away any attempt to censure the representation of deprived childhood. The stories are a mix of social, cultural and literary traditions and Dickens’ own lived experience against the backdrop of the moral, educational and aesthetic canons of his time. His child characters stand out as metaphorical portraits, all the more striking for the fact that they give the reader an insight into the inner most feelings of the child. As such, they are key source material for research into children’s literature, the history of childhood and educational and psycho-educational investigation into childhood distress.