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Echoes of Injustice: Charles Dickens' Critique of Poverty and Exploitation in David Copperfield

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: It aims to examine how Charles Dickens' most powerful critique of social injustice is revealed in his novel David Copperfield by opening up a world of poverty and exploitation in Victorian England. Dickens uses David's eyes to discover the bitters of the poor, especially to the neglect and mistreatment of children condemned to labor. In his own life, for example, Dickens shows how these cycles of poverty repeat themselves systemically in characters such as David and Micawbers, who fight for emancipation from a soulless legal and social system. As a compelling narrative, a sharp indictment of Victorian society's indifference to the distress of its less fortunate members, it is no less. Dickens' work not only showed his readers these injustices but asked his readership for empathy and reform, earning him a long-lasting place in the history of social consciousness and literature. This paper takes Charles Dickens' David Copperfield through this prism to explore his critique of social injustice by tracing poverty and exploitation. Historical conditions of child labor, class disparity and neglect of institutions are portrayed in Victorian English. By following David's journey, Dickens points out how poverty is internal to society in the systems that maintain it, and the lack of interest that allows the exploitation of others. Through this study of the key characters and events of this novel, the thesis proves that Dickens used fiction as a tool for social reform, delivering both and engrossing story and scathing social criticism of the Victorian period. The novel remains relevant as a reminder of the need to practice empathy and reform to combat social inequities.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15198853
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W6893386743
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