To what extent does Dickens seek to demonstrate truth through non-realistic and symbolic strategies of representation as well as through realism?

Charles Dickens manages to combine in his works wonderful story-telling, humour, pathos and irony with severe social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined. His "Hard Times" and "Great Expectations" are good proof for the above statement. Both are written in the second period of Dickens' literary career, a period marked with pessimism, cynicism and indignation.
Dickens demonstrates exactly that dark truth for the period in his two novels. He achieves his precise observation and representation of truth through non-realistic and symbolic strategies as…