Asone of the world’s most eminent novelists, Charles Dickens‘s works have exerteda significant impact on English social culture, policies and literary creationafterwards. Besides, Dickens’s novels serve as the best materials when Chineseintend to learn more about the Victorian England. Dickensian world is the wholeEnglish society of his time, with its law-courts, the government offices, theprison, the poor house, parliamentary elections and child labor, whosecharacters come from all walks of life: cruel employers in Hard Times,filthy and wicked thieves in Oliver Twist, kind gentlemen in Greatexpectations, hypocritical philanthropists and evangelist in The BleakHouse. It is a panorama of English life then: the Londonstreet, the messy traffic, the factories, slums, hotels, the tainted Thames, the grocery stores, the steamboats. All thetraits of Londonin the 19^th Century have been recorded and displayed in his works.Therefore, to know more about English history and Victorian fictions, Dickens’snovels can never be ignored. Additionally, the archetypal Dickensian hero isusually an orphan with a sorrowful and suffering experience. Dickens preferslooking into the society with children’s eyes, unmasking the social injusticeand false charity. Thus, Dickens’s orphan complex is the key to understand hismasterpieces.

Onaccount of his charming characters and thrilling plots, Dickens has appealedloads of scholars both home and abroad to go further study into his works. In Britain and theU.S.A, researchers have done a good deal of mature and systematic researches onCharles Dickens and his works from various perspectives. And the U.K.has established many journals and reference books for him, such as TheDickensian (since1905), Dickens Quarterly (1984--2011) ,theDickens Index(1990),etc.

In1971, a book including over 100 research articles was edited by Collins. Inthis book, some writers discuss in a detail Dickens’s description of London’s unique landscapein his works; some articles talk about the women who have great influence onDickens#8223; life and his works.

Recently,an English author Peter Cook has published a book named “The Romantic legacy of Charles Dickens”in 2017. In this book, Cook has analyzed Dickens’ life experience so that heshined the spotlight on the Romanticism features of Dickens’ works.

Apartfrom the aboard studies, many Chinese scholars have done many researches onDickens’s works. Chinese research on Dickens is roughly divided into threeperiods. From 1907 to 1949 when the new China was established, it was thefirst period. Overall, the research in this period is relatively shallow, andhas not yet formed a complete system, mostly staying at the introduction level.The founding of the New China to the Cultural Revolution was in the mid-term.During this period, most of the films were concentrated in the film adaptationof Dickens’s novels, including "Pickwick on the screen". Since thereform and opening up, it has entered the third stage, a period of prosperitywith fruitful and satisfying results. For example, Luo Jingguo's "DickensReview", Zhao Yanqiu's "Dickens's Novel Study", ZhuHong's "Dickens' s Novel Appreciation". These achievementscover the Dickens’s life and creative review, basic themes, narrative methodsand artistic features, as well as the comparison between Dickens and otherwriters. The ideas are broad, the methods are no longer single, and new methodssuch as new criticism, archetypal criticism, especially psychoanalysis, areintroduced.

Therelationship between psychoanalysis and literary criticism spans much of the 20^th century. It starts with Sigmund Freud’s analysis of the literary work as asymptom of the artist, where the bound between authors and their texts areanalogous to dreamers and their dreams. And then it is contested by Jung’s “archetypal” criticism, in which the literarywork is not a focus for the author’s personal psychology but a representationof the relationship between the personal and the collective unconscious, theimages, myths, symbols, “archetypes” of the past cultures. Therefore, studyingDickens’ work under the guidance of Jung’s analytical psychology isfar-reaching.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

This paper will mainly focus on Dickensian orphans in his famousworks including David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Bleak House and GreatExpectations. Because of various reasons, Dickens has some special feelingsfor orphans that became the main stream in his literary creations. This paperwill analyze the motives and emotions of Dickens “orphan complex” by means ofJung’s analytical psychology to find out why Dickens is so obsessed with “orphans”and what are his purposes by writing orphans.

Asfor methodology, this paper will use the psychological approach to analyze theDickensian orphans and go further into the study of Dickens’ personalexperience, trying to find the bound between them. And in this paper twoquestions will be mainly focused :

1.What is a Dickensian orphan?

2.Why does Dickens like to write about them?