Analysing the master and servant dialectic in Charles Dickens' the Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit

The Victorian Age (1837-1901) is the period in which Britain witnesses such contradictory novelties as the economic and industrial development of the country, the conversion of the country to the empire, and a strict class division between the middle class and the working class. All these changes find a place in the works of British authors, especially in the works of Charles Dickens (1812-1870), one of the most prominent writers of the Victorian Age. In his works, particularly in The Pickwick Papers (1836-7) and Little Dorrit (1855-7), the class division becomes a big part of fiction. In both of these works, Dickens reflects the lives of the characters in terms of the master and the servant relationship. The aim of this thesis is to analyse Dickens' two novels in the light of Hegel's Master and Servant Dialectic. This dialectic has two distinct manifestations in these novels: the mutual recognition of the master and the servant in The Pickwick Papers and the dual role of the master in Little Dorrit. In order to do so, a panorama of Victorian Britain in the 1830s and the 1850s is given so that the effect of the different time-spaces of the novels could be better understood. This thesis concludes that Charles Dickens portrays and represents Hegelian Master and Servant Dialectic in The Pickwick Papers and Little Dorrit and argues that these portrayals are different from one another. Keywords: Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers, Little Dorrit, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Industrial Revolution, Victorian England, Master and Servant Dialectic.