Perhaps leaving school at the age of twelve to work in a boot-blacking factory left a deep impression on Dickens’s mind. The events that followed up after the incarceration of his father at debtor prison may have turned Dickens into a social reformer as we know it today. Shortly, after this abrupt break, he returned to complete his education and start his career as a journalist. Charles John Huffman Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 February 1812. In his entire lifetime as a writer, he wrote extensively; he edited several journals, wrote some score or two novels, and more than a hundred short stories while vociferously fighting for children’s rights and social reforms.

               Dickens was known to be topical thus inspiring a new class of readers. One might not be wrong to call him the Robin Hood with a pen when hordes of untaught paid half a penny to have his publications read to them. Perhaps, the novel that comes closest to the reformist’s zeal is Little Dorrit. The institution of debtor’s prison and paralysed bureaucracy in the Office of Circumlocution was first highlighted. Britain’s obsession with social hierarchies and class also finds a grim mention. Contemporary in plot development, it is based on the event of the loss of more of than 300 British soldiers owing to HM Treasury’s negligence.

              The loss of childhood and children’s rights are best exemplified in The Personal History of David Copperfield. It was published in 1850. Semi-autobiographical in nature, it traces the psychological development of David Copperfield. The character of David- a favourite of Freud- has in its centre a child whose childhood was an abrupt departure from idyllic to cruel as his step-father stepped in. Soon after, a can of worms opened. At the age of ten, David’s mother died. Pulled out of school and sent to work in a wine-bottle factory, it was the start of David’s descent into instabilities. Mired in misadventures, hopping from home to home, David, finally, lodges with Miss Betsey Trotwood after Mr. Micawber is sent to the debtor’s prison. Under the tutelage of Dr Strong and later working as his assistant, he starts reporting parliamentary debates and writing fiction.

                The legal system criticised in ‘The Bleak House’ was published serially between 1852 and 1853. Though criticised to be an exaggerated account of events from the legal quarters, it resulted in the enactment of legal reforms in the 1870s. At the heart of judicial reforms is a tedious running case in the Court of Chancery.

                 Social realism is a style of writing fiction that incorporates realistic descriptions of the working class and poor. Calling spade a spade, Dickens does full justice to the style through his novels. The three novels under discussion above are the primary examples of positive activism that brought about necessary changes in the lives and minds of the English.