Dickensian

Etymology

From Charles Dickens, the nineteenth-century English novelist whose books — "Oliver Twist," "Bleak House," "Hard Times" — portrayed the poverty and injustice of industrial Britain alongside a gallery of memorably grotesque characters. The adjective points both ways: to grim social conditions and to eccentric, larger-than-life personalities and their improbable names.

adjective · /dih-KEN-zee-un/
Reminiscent of the poverty, squalor, and social hardship — or the vivid, grotesque characters — of Charles Dickens’s novels.
What it names
The look and feel of Victorian want, from workhouses to grimy tenements — use it for conditions of harsh, old-fashioned deprivation, or for comically exaggerated characters and their names.
Example
The report described dickensian conditions in the dormitory — damp walls, twelve to a room, and no heat through the winter.
Related idea
Squalid describes filth and degradation plainly; dickensian frames the same deprivation within a specific Victorian, storybook atmosphere of hardship.