Charles Dickens and Victorian Age, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Charles Dickens and Victorian Age e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHARLES DICKENS Charles Dickens was born Portsmouth in 1812. He had a very unhappy childhood, because his father was imprisoned for debts, so he was obliged to work in a factory of taps but also when his father was released his mother insisted that he continue to work. At fifteen he found employment in a lawyer’s office, but continued his self-made education studying shorthand at night. By 1832, he had become a very successful report of Parliamentary debates, and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In 1836 he published a collection of articles describing London’s people and scenes, called “Sketches by Boz”, that was immediately followed by “The Pickwick Papers” that revealed Dickens’s humoristic and satirical qualities. Then he started his career as a novelist: from 1837 to 1839 he wrote “Oliver Twist” , in 1939 “Nicholas Nickleby”, after a period in the USA in which he advocated international copyright and the abolition of slavery, in 1843 published “A Christmas Carol”, 1849-1850 “David Copperfield” and in 1854 “Hard Times” which deal with social issues such as the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. It is important to say that Dickens was the first novelist who places children as protagonists in his novels; in fact he reversed the natural route of things: children, symbolically the innocence, became the teachers of adults, their examples and models to follow while in reality should be the opposite. He is also considered a social reformer because he denounce terrible condition in which children died, and show the power of criminality that was more and more increasing, with the growth of gang of pickpockets. He presented these points to healthy man and middle class in a way they cannot ignore. He died in 1870 in London and he is buried in Westminster Abbey. IN GENERAL: • Charles Dickens is an omniscient author, external of the story, but give an intern point of view because the majority of his novels are autobiographic. • Dickens’s novels are autobiographic because denouncing social issues in a personal way in order to his life experience, the readers reading his novels could recognize themselves. • Charles Dickens choose the name of the characters on purpose because they characterized their nature and character, so are very meaningful. For example in Hard Times, the name Gradgrind contained the world “grind” that is a specific process in industrial machine, and the name Bounderby contained the world “bounder” that is a dishonest person. The surname Twist, in the novel Oliver Twist, means that he bounces from bad and good luck. Thanks to the description of the characters in a comic way, he became a popular author. • The society of this century was mainly formed by middle class, that became always more interested in reading, especially thanks to the landing library, in which books were lent for a few penny, and to the social task of the novel, that was to make a portrait of life and social problems of the time in a faithful way to reality, without any filter. So the victorian novelists wrote about contemporary facts, because people wanted to know the problems of their time and reading novels was the only way to do this, but they didn’t give any solution to solve these problems. • Language: especially in characters’s direct speeches, is used cockney, that is a poor language that everyone could understand. It can describes in realistic words what he denounces. • The style is lively, ironic and comic. In the end also satirical in order to which were his aims to convey to his readers. • He criticized the principles of criticism. The Criticism thought about Charles Dickens that he was a too sentimental writer; in fact all the ends of his novels are positive and happy. • Charles Dickens was influenced by William Shakespeare, in fact he loved also the theater and was an actor. The novels that present difficult plots were designed for the theater, so were put on stage. Dickens was influenced also in the way of the describing a person: like Shakespeare, he didn’t go against the tradition, but gave also other way to describe. For example the portrait of Fagin in Oliver Twist. HARD TIMES (1854) This novel was set in Coketown, an imaginary industrial town in the north of England, where there were a lot of coal mines. Coke is specific type of coal so is very meaningful and symbolic of every industrialized town. PLOT: In Coketown Mr. Gradgrind, a strict educator who believes in facts, statistics and numbers, had founded a school where his theories are taught and he bring up his two children, Louisa and Tom, repressing their imagination and feelings. He decided that his daughter Louisa had to marry Mr. Bounderby, a wealth man richer than him, who was 30 years older than her. Louisa accepted to marry him because she wanted to help his brother Tom, who was unable to work, finding him a job in Bounderby’s bank. Tom, who was a wicked person, robbed his employer to make easy money but he was discovered and obliged to leave the town. In the end of the novel, Mr. Gradgrind recognized that his learning method is bad. The novel was written to highlight some topics that are the inhumanity of factory system, in fact Dickens denounces the bad effects of industrialization, the education, starting from his experience and he wants to demonstrate that in this century England was turning people into machine, because working in factories they didn't have the possibility to get better their lives. In the 19th century the basic education was based on “3R” that were reading, riting and rithmetics. There were differences in education between the classes: rich children had a private teacher while poor children went to sunday school or ragged school, because sunday was the only day they did’t work. Only after his death, in 1870 with the Education Act the school was obliged for the children under the age of 12, and teachers used to punish their students with cane. In Dickens’s age there was a philosophical current called Utilitarianism, a current of Positivism in which everything could be explained rationally, following economical practical utility. These principles were applied to school programs, and were embodied in Mr. Gradgrind. In fact one strategy singled out for Criticism was the object lesson, that was originally conceived as a method of instruction arising from children experiences but later lead to lessons whose vocabulary and content weren’t suited to children’s experience. Dickens believe in the extension of education to all citizens and denounce the utilitarian principles applied to school because repressed creativity, imagination and feelings. THE DEFINITION OF A HORSE: The passage starts with a long description of Mr. Gradgrind who is teaching in a white washed room where there were two groups of students, one composed by girls and the other by boys. Soon called the girl number twenty because he don’t know her. She was Sissy Jupe, who, blushing, stood up and curtseyed. Mr Gradgrind started to say that Sissy wasn’t a name, and that is father, calling her so, had no business to do it; then he asked her what was his father’s trade and she replied that he was a veterinary surgeon, even though at first she had confused ideas. The teacher asked her the definition of a horse, and she didn’t know, so his square fingers lighted suddenly on Bitzer, maybe because he sat in the same ray of sunlight that irradiated Sissy. The boy gave a complete and rich definition of a horse: graminivorous, forty teeth, in the spring sheds the coal, in marshy countries