Dickens and His Older People: The Portrayal of Older Adult Characters in the Early Novels of Charles Dickens (1836-1841) (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781911761532)

What does it mean to grow old? And what did Charles Dickens, the most celebrated storyteller of the Victorian age, really think about the older people he placed at the heart of his fiction? These are the questions driving this original, illuminating study by Mervyn Eastman, a social gerontologist with decades of professional experience in ageing and social care.

Social gerontologist Mervyn Eastman applies a gerontological and biographical lens to six of Charles Dickens's early works: The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Oliver Twist (1837- 39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), A Christmas Carol (1843), and Barnaby Rudge (1841, examining how the young Dickens constructed, portrayed, and used older adult characters in his fiction.

Drawing on social history, literary criticism, and the emerging field of literary gerontology, Eastman maps every older character across these six works, from central figures such as Fagin, Samuel Pickwick, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Daniel Quilp to the dozens of walk-on parts whose age, appearance, and behaviour betray the assumptions of late Georgian and early Victorian society.

He situates these portrayals within the biographical and socio-historical context of Dickens's own life, tracing the influence of family trauma, professional experience, and personal fear of ageing on the novelist's imagination.

The book asks whether the young Dickens, writing between his mid-twenties and early thirties, demonstrated signs of gerontophobia, or whether his mixed and often contradictory portrayals of older people reflect the complex, contested attitudes of his era. Issues of class, gender, disability, poverty, criminality, and institutional power are all examined in relation to the construction of old age in Dickens's early fiction.