Dickens himself grew up in poverty

The argument

When Dickens was a child, his father was incarcerated in a debtors' jail in 1824, meaning the family struggled to support themselves and the young Dickens was forced to work in a factory — an instance he later used for the main character of his novel "David Copperfield". The detail matters to the argument, because this was lived poverty rather than observed poverty, encountered at an age when a child has no means of escaping or explaining it. He then took a job as a clerk for a lawyer, which he found stressful and difficult, before finding success and later fame as a novelist and journalist. Critics draw a line from that beginning to the preoccupations of the work. This early experience of poverty has been cited by some critics as Dickens' reason for focusing so significantly on the plight of the poor in his novels — not as an occasional subject but as their recurring centre. On this reading the choice of subject is itself evidence of a social commitment: a novelist who had climbed out of poverty could have written about anything at all, and returned repeatedly to the people still in it. Several plots are informed by his experiences directly. "Little Dorrit" focused on his father's experience of debtors' jail, whilst "The Old Curiosity Shop" discussed his time working for a legal firm. In both cases the material comes from the writer's own life rather than from research or observation at a distance, which lends the novels an authenticity which makes their depictions of the poor all the more significant. A sentimental portrait written from the outside can be discounted by a comfortable reader; it is much harder to discount one written by someone describing conditions he had been placed in himself. Taken together, the biography and the books point the same way. Dickens wrote about poverty with the authority of having lived it, and used the most popular form of his day to press the plight of the poor on his readers — which is what makes him a social progressive.

Context

Debtors' jail: a prison where people who owed debts were incarcerated until they had worked off their debt through labour or were able to pay it back in cash.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although Dickens' own experience of poverty does add some authenticity to his writing, his family had previously been wealthy and he experienced what was then known as "genteel poverty" - the plight of previously well-off people who had fallen on hard times - and later in life he was extremely wealthy and successful but still continued to write about the poor, suggesting that his own experiences were not a significant factor in his decisions to write about poverty. Additionally, growing up in poverty does not automatically make him a social progressive because it cannot be seen as the sole cause of his later writings.

Rejecting the premises

1. He had been born middle-class and still benefited from this class distinction even when his father was in debtors' jail. 2. Much of his writing on the poor is not drawn from his own experience and can thus still be considered sensationalised.