ABSTRACT
For many people, Charles Dickens is the Victorian era. G. M. Young's tip fits Dickens almost embarrassingly well: he became twenty in 1832, and was indeed a press-gallery reporter when the Reform Bill was passing through Parliament. Dickens' first story appeared in 1833 and he was still writing Edwin Drood when he died in 1870. These decades saw great political, social and institutional changes, to many of which he was very alert, realising that in modern urbanised society much of people's felicity or misery depended on the adequacy, efficiency, justice and humanity of institutions. Dickens was very visibly, as well as ideologically, a man of his times: but, though generally reformist and radical, he by no means approved of all the reforms of the 1830s. The American critic, Edmund Wilson, asserted in his very influential essay Dickens: The Two Scrooges that Of all the great Victorian writers, he was probably the most antagonistic to the Victorian age itself.
