Charles Dickens Research Paper

In the time of Charles dickens, 204 million people followed the Christian beliefs. This is around 20% of the 1000 million people of the world population. In the 19thcentury, more and more people became religious. From 1850 to 1890 religion adherence rates grew by 12%. Christianity being the most popular religion meant that Dickens could use quotes or stories from the bible because his readers would understand the reference. The most disliked religious group were the Jews, so Dickens also took advantage of that to create negative characters in his book. In his writings, Charles Dickens shows his dislike of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism, but, especially in his fiction, he is very hesitant to make professions of a specific faith beyond

In Victorian times, society was strictly layered not only into rich and poor, or even upper, middle or lower class, but hundreds of sections. People were expected to “know their place”, and the church taught them to be happy with what class you were in. Dickens didn’t like the effects of social class. At the time, many people were becoming aware of the need to improve the condition in which the poor found themselves. Dickens was a great supporter of social reform- especially in schools and prisons. The social classes of England were newly reforming. There was a stirring disorder of the old hierarchical order, and the middle classes were growing every day. Added to that, the upper classes’ composition was changing from simply hereditary aristocracy to a combination of nobility and an emerging wealthy commercial class. The definition of what made someone a gentleman or a lady was, therefore, changing at what some thought was an alarming rate. In Dickens’ time, there was little to no social mobility and nobody really travelled from where they were born, you died in the place and class into which you were born. Cases like the one pip experienced in the book would have been rare and almost unthinkable due to the limited interaction between the classes and the degree of superiority felt by someone of higher class towards one of a lower