E X T E N S I O N DICKENS THE REFORMER Dickens s knowledge of the lower classes of Victorian society, his experience as a reporter in the Law Courts and as a parliamentary reporter made him a committed reformer. His Sketches by Boz is an early example of the reformer s anger at those who condemn the symptoms of poverty without considering its causes: Gin-drinking is a great vice in England, but wretchedness and dirt are greater; and until you improve the homes of the poor, or persuade a half-famished wretch not to seek relief in the temporary oblivion of his own misery, [ ] gin-shops will increase in number and splendour. Oliver Twist was partly inspired by Dickens s hatred of the New Poor Law, which he heard debated in Parliament and which he viewed as a subordination of the needs of the poor to institutional control and efficiency. His magazine, Household Words, often became the voice of Dickens the radical moralist. The 4 January 1851 issue, for instance, contained an article that presented a very different image of England from that promoted by the Great Exhibition of that year. Entitled The Last Words of the Old Year, the article described dispossessed and hungry children, desperate farmers, crowded slums, sewers that spread disease throughout the country. To urge reform of these brutal facts, Dickens regularly employed Household Words to campaign for improvements in sanitation, slum housing, popular education, and workplace safety. Another important issue was education. In his books and articles the author heavily objected to the mechanical way of teaching in utilitarian schools, where the facts taught to children had no use at all in normal life. The main criticism that can be found in such novels as Hard Times and Bleak House lies in the difference between the rights of the rich people and the rights of the poor people: justice was based on money which left the rights to the rich and the duties to the poor. So, according to Dickens, the Court, where justice should reign, was the place where Law was not the same for everybody, which the writer considered a terrible social deficit. The laws of Dickens time seem to have been really unsatisfactory and one has to agree with Dickens s sentence: Suffer any wrong that can be done to you, rather than come to Court! Consequently Dickens took a stand against the law that punished rather than helped people and was deeply aware of the necessity of law reforms. For example in Hard Times he specifically criticised the unfair divorce laws of his time that required lots of money to get a divorce. Another instance of his demand for reforms was represented by his position towards death penalty: in March 1846 he wrote a long and carefully reasoned attack on capital punishment for the Daily News. This attack was echoed 45