To understand, how would Dickens react to our modern society, we must first understand, what aspects of life did he mention in his literature. After the main concept of his works is interpreted, it would be easy to define his writings as of today.
What literary themes did Dickens refer to in his works? As a realist, he depicted the life from the most truthful point of view: the Industrial Revolution period, the boring, gray landscapes of the crowded, dirty cities of the Victorian Era. He illustrated a perverse society, where any manifestation of individualism was suppressed, where injustice was a common thing, where the government was corrupt, where people forgot about their rights and duties, a society of criminals, gluttons, exploiters and cruelty.
Dickens, wrote mainly about children or teenagers. He aspired to describe how the chauvinist society affected the fragile mind and thinking of children, how it hindered (or, perhaps, somewhat even assisted) their development and understanding. He colorfully depicted the difficulty with which his teenage heroes tried to escape the fate of becoming thieves, burglars, fraudsters or charlatans. The most of his teenage characters have positive values, moral and principles, but all of them face sophisticated challenges, which test and shape their personalities. His heroes show humanistic qualities, as sincerity, concern for others, amiability, trustworthiness, kindness, politeness. Precisely, the very qualities helped them to become individualists, in opposition to the standardized, stereotypical masses of those days. Those were the milestones of Dickens’ art. Those qualities equally brought his heroes to literary perfection. The preciseness, with which he delineates those qualities, is amazing.
So, after having overviewed Dickens’ literary concerns and tendencies, there is a firm platform, on which some assumptions can be made. Now is the time to try and answer the pending question: what would Dickens’ writings be like, if he wrote them today?
Nowadays society is way far from the society of the Victorian Era. Of course, the technological and sociological progress could not allow our modern society to be equal to the one described by Dickens, but some tendencies, actually, still remain unchanged.
I think, that today Charles Dickens would still focus on children and teenagers. His main concern would still be the problem of interaction of teenagers and the grown-up part of the mankind. If we look carefully around us, we would find manifestations of Dickens’ heroes even among our closest relations. We would find children that, like Oliver Twist, wander in the streets looking for food and shelter, we can still see teenagers oppressed by grown-ups everywhere, especially in the schools, just for having individual, independent opinions.
On the other hand, how would Dickens illustrate our nowadays society? Would visions of an unbearable dystopia, like Orwell’s “1984”, arise in his mind, or, perhaps, he would view the problems and shortcomings of our modern society as the pain of salvation for us? I personally think, that Dickens would, most likely, criticize the overwhelming tendencies, especially when it comes to children and teenagers and their relations with the outer world. His main concerns would be the two institutions, which tend to care about children: schools and orphanages, but especially the first. So, I have a reason to ask: Did you know that the Dickens hero is my classmate? Yes, he is. And, probably, everyone had classmates which reflected the heroes of the English classic, which were independent, friendly, trustworthy and honest.
As our governments and other social institutions try to make the children's life more comfortable, Dickens’ would somewhat change his ways of writing. Rather than depicting the physical difficulties and obstacles which certainly were of great importance in the Victorian Era, he would focus more on the psychological aspect. In other words, he would describe the inner world of the teenagers, their problems and fears. Following this pattern, it becomes clear that Dickens already had a manifestation of himself as a writer in the more recent world of literature: Jerome D Salinger discussed the psychological problems and ethical dilemmas that a teenager could face in his novel “The Catcher In The Rye”. By that, he did the same, as Dickens, but focused more on psychology, than physiology.