Charles Dickens appunti, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Charles Dickens appunti e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Charles Dickens Life Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth. When he was nine, he was sent to school, but his education was short. Three years later, his father was imprisoned for debts, and he was forced to work ten-our days in a factory that made shoe polish. He suffered of terrible loneliness, the terrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest of his life but all his experiences became materials for his future work. In 1833 started his career as a journalist and he became the parliamentary report for The Morning Chronicle. After his marriage with Catherine Hogart, he published his first novel called Pickwick Papers. Dickens produced lots of novels, published ad instalments and then books. He found time to travel in America for a lecture against slavery and to Italy. He also performed in front of Queen Victoria. He left his wife for his mistress. He died on 9 June 1870. Works Charles Dickens’ novels range from the humor of the Pickwick Papers to the Little Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop. He was full of inventiveness; he created a whole world of characters; his sympathy for the oppressed; his indignation against social injustice. Pickwick Papers is a series of tales connected by the same protagonist, Mr. Pickwick. This is an example of the Dickens’ humor based on the creation of characters with peculiarity of speech, gesture, physical appearance, comic situations. • Oliver Twist is his most famous work, and it marks the beginning of social criticism. The protagonist is Oliver, an orphaned boy that lives in a workhouse victim of exploitation. • A Christmas Carol it’s a ghost story about a miser that converts himself to the spirit go Christmas • Dombey and Son that attacks the greed for money and power • David Copperfield the most explicitly autobiography • Bleak House a satire on English administration • Hard Times about education and the hardship of the working class • Great Expectations about the influence that sudden wealth can have a young man’s moral growth Dickens’ plot Dickens wrote very quickly because of the pressure of both the publishers and his own need for money. The effect of serial publications was considerable, they were the publishers’ device to increase sales; Dickens had to maintain the interest from one episode to another, he did so by keeping a dramatic turn of events. He also had to answer his readers’ tastes that brings melodrama in lots of his works. If during the enlightenment Daniel Defoe represented the values of the new middle class, Charles Dickens represented in his novels the social issues of the Victorian age. The Victorian Age was an age of incredible contrast: the rich people who had increased their economical state and the poor ones who were exploited. Dickens’ characters Dickens’ novels are host by typical character that are often caricatures of vices or virtues, they are the most memorable characters in English literature. Some of these names became part of the English language: “Fagin” from the villain of Oliver Twist that is synonym of theft; “Micawber” from David Copperfield that stands for an irresponsibly optimistic fellow. The Condition of England Novel Dickens’ novels are focused on social criticism, he mostly faced the consequences of the Industrial Revolution on the lives of the poor people, themes such as the working conditions, the education, child labor, crime. The writer wanted to denounce the social evils of that time and wanted to make his readers aware of them. He believed in the political and ethical potential of literature. An Urban Novelist Made an exception for Hard Times that was set in Coketown, mostly all of Dickens’ novels are set in London. In Oliver Twist we see a foggy London with dirty streets, lots of criminals, with poor people living in appalling conditions. He used to be a journalist, so he was an incredible observer, his language was direct but also rich of description. Dickens’ legacy in the English language The massive use of adjectives placed the writer almost in the same league in terms of familiarity as Shakespeare. Dickens had an important role in spreading words that already existed in the English language but were unknown. He also uses popular expression which became common in English. He was very good with names, he invented names that were so effective that they now have a meaning. The best screenwriter of all times Thanks to his ability in writing became, Dickens became an inspiration among filmmakers for creating their plot. There are more than 300 film of Dickens’ novels, he is the most popular writer in cinema after William Shakespeare. All this thanks to his abundance in description, his use of visually effective words, his narrative structure (division in chapters). Oliver Twist Plot Oliver, the protagonist, was born in a workhouse. He is an orphan, son of an unknown father and his mother died in childbirth. The conditions at the workhouse are terrible, the boys suffer from hunger. One day Oliver, encouraged by other boys, decides to ask for more food. This request provokes a reaction from the officials that send him away. Oliver goes way from London, and he becomes involved with a gang of thieves, led by Fagin. On his first mission Oliver gets arrested but then helped by Mr. Brownlow, the victim of the gang. Fagin manages to force Oliver into taking part in a burglary where he gets shot and abandoned. He is then rescued by Mrs. Maylie. A prostitute that is part of Fagin’s gang, discovers why Fagin is so interested in having Oliver by their side: Monks is Oliver’s half-brother; he wanted to kill him to get the entire inheritance. All the gang dies or get imprisoned, Oliver knows his identity and receives his father’s inheritance and gets adopted by Mr. Brownlow. Oliver undergoes different bad experiences but, in the end, he can finally enjoy the rest of his life, free from the workhouse and the gang. Poor law and workhouses Dickens himself had had personal experience in the industrial world as a child so in this novel he expresses all his anger about the living conditions of the poor after the Poor Law of 1834 which said that charity had to be administered through workhouses so, under these conditions, poverty as seen as a sin. This is the typical puritan mentality according to you are the author of your destiny so if you had to deserve everything trough work. He transformed his unhappy experience into a precious point of view that he gave in his novel. Nothing but facts – Hard Times 'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!' The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the speaker's square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster's sleeve. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts stored inside. The speaker's obstinate carriage, square coat, square legs, square shoulders, - nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it was, - all helped the emphasis. 'In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!' The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present, all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim. Coketown – Hard Times Coketown [...] was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. [...] You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there — as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done — they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town- hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M‘Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchasable in the cheapest market and salable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.