Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,7, University of Würzburg, language: English, abstract: To interest and affect the general mind in behalf of anything that is clearly wrong - to stimulate and rouse the public soul to a compassionate orindignant feeling that it must not be - without obtruding any pet theory of cause and cure, and so throwing off allies as they spring up - I believe to be one of Fiction´s highest uses. And this is the use which I try to turn it. This explanation by Charles Dickens about the use of fiction describes his self-imposed duty towards the British society of Victorian England perfectly. Charles Dickens was not only a novelist. He was, because of his "extraordinary nature, the durability, and the extent of his popularity" during lifetime, obliged to "a unique - public responsibility as a writer" (Slater 49).