Scarica Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist: letteratura inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Charles Dickens He was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood: his father was imprisoned for debt, and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. By 1832 he had become a very successful reporter of parliamentary debates in the house of commons and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. Dickens married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836, and Suring the same year he became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany. Dickens later started a full-time career as a novelist, but although he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. Although he was a republican, Dickens took strongly against the United States Characters: Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel: the 18th century middle classes world was replaced by one of the lower orders. He was the creator of characters and caricatures who live immortally in the English imagination. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits and the language of the London middle and lower classes. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast and the working class. Children are often the most important characters in Dickens’s novels. Didactic aim Dickens’s task was never to get the most wronged and suffering to rebel, or even encourage discontent, but to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems. Style and reputation Dickens employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and character ever attempted by any novelist. He did so with his careful choice of adjectives, repetitions, words and structures, juxtapositions of images and ideas, hyperbolic and ironic remarks Oliver Twist Plot: Oliver Twist is a poor boy of unknown parents; he is brought up in a workhouse in an inhuman way. He is later sold to an undertaker as an apprentice, but the cruelty and the unhappiness he experiences with his new master causes him to run away to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of young pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger and trained by the elderly Fagin, who try to make a thief out of him. One day, Oliver is taken to witness a theft by the gang. Mr. Brownlow, the victim, is stricken by Oliver's ragged appearance and after learning more about the boy, decides to take him into his home. Oliver is eventually kidnapped by the gang and forced to commit a burglary; during the job, he is shot and wounded. He is then adopted by Mr. Brownlow and at last receives kindness and affection. Investigations are made about who Oliver really is and it is discovered that he has noble origins. In the end, the gang leaders and Oliver's half-brother, who paid the thieves in order to ruin Oliver and have their father's property all for himself, are arrested. Settings and characters: The most important setting of the novel is London, which is depicted at three different social levels. 1) The parochial world of the workhouses 2) The criminal world (poverty drives them to crime) 3) The world of the Victorian middle class (people show regard for a moral value and believe in the principle of human dignity) Theme: This novel was written to attack the cruelty of institutions, like the workhouse, and of individuals towards poor children, who are presented as either innocent or corrupted by adults. Childhood and the terrible effects of poverty on an individual's life are the other important themes in Oliver Twist. At Dickens's time, lots of poor children who escaped an early death were obliged either to work in factories and mines or as domestic servants and chimney sweepers. Others became criminals. Therefore, crime is also at the center of Oliver Twist. OLIVER WANTS SOME MORE The text can be divided into three parts: ● The introduction describes the condition of Oliver and his friends, obliged to suffer a slow starvation for three months. But one boy, tall for his age, threatened some night to eat the boy who slept next him! A council was held, and someone had to ask the master for more food: it fell to Oliver Twist. ● The second part, the fact, is described in a very precise way: Dickens describes the moment of the dinner, each character and his role, and then describes Oliver's feeling. “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery”.
