This episode offers a comprehensive and conceptually rich exploration of Charles Dickens as a novelist whose fiction became one of the most powerful instruments of social criticism in Victorian England. Moving beyond biography or plot summary, the discussion situates Dickens within the social realities of the nineteenth century, industrialisation, urban poverty, child labour, class inequality, and institutional injustice. It shows how these forces shaped both his life and his imaginative vision.

Beginning with Dickens’s formative experiences of poverty and early labour, the episode traces how personal trauma evolved into a sustained literary engagement with social suffering and moral responsibility. Major works such as Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Great Expectations, and A Christmas Carol are examined as vehicles of critique, revealing how Dickens exposes the failures of education, law, bureaucracy, and utilitarian thinking through memorable characters, symbolic settings, satire, and emotional appeal.

The episode also analyses Dickens’s narrative strategies, explaining how sentiment, humour, irony, and serial storytelling function not as artistic excesses but as deliberate ethical tools designed to awaken social conscience. Attention is given to critical debates around Dickens’s politics and sentimentality, alongside his enduring relevance in contemporary discussions of inequality, labour, and human dignity.

Designed for UG and PG students, teachers, and serious readers of English literature, this episode serves as a definitive study guide to understanding Dickens as a social novelist—one whose fiction continues to challenge readers to see literature as a force for empathy, moral reflection, and social awareness.