Charles Dickens, Hard Times and Coketown., Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Charles Dickens, Hard Times and Coketown. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! He was born in Portsmouth from a poor family in 1812. His father went to prison when he was 12, so he had to go to work in a factory and in this way he could understand the misery of poor people especially the problem of exploitation of children. He had a bad education because he went in a poor school. When he was 16 he has to work in a Loyal office, then he became a clerk, then a parliamentary reporter. He wrote about poor people, the way they lived. But he didn’t do any action to change this situation: he only wrote. After the success of The pickwick Papers, humorous stories about a group of eccentrics who met to recount their adventures, Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist. The protagonist of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit became the symbols of an exploited childhood (un’infanzia sfruttata) confronted with the grim and bitter realities (con le realtà amare e cupe) of slums and factories (delle baraccopoli e delle fabbriche). Dickens describes characters, habits and language of the middle and lower classes in modern London. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast, and also the working class. Children are often the most important characters in Dickens’s novels. Children are the moral teachers, models of the way people ought to behave towards one another. Dickens’s task was never to induce the most wronged and suffering to rebel. HARD T IMES Is a novel of social protest which attacks utilitarianism, Bentham’s theory which only considered the practical aspects of happiness and ignored emotional, spiritual and moral values. It is set in Coketown, a fictions industrial city in northern England in the mid-1800s. It has been said that Coketown has the characteristics of real factory towns like Manchester. Thomas Gradrind is a strictly functional; the arts and literature are totally excluded because they have no use, and students must learn nothing but facts, to the detriment of their imaginations. He has imposed this learning method on his own five children, and they are like so many carbon copies of each other. Mr Gradgrind’s closet friend is Josiah Bounderby, a self-made banker and the chief villain of the novel. The two of them decide that Sissy Jupe – one of the students – must be expelled from the school because, being an emotional and imaginative child, she has a bad influence on the other students. But when they learn that Sissy’s father seems to have abandoned his daughter, Gradgrind takes pity on her and, against Bounderby’s judgement, decides to let her live in his home. She becomes like a sister to Gradgrind’s daughter Louisa, an unhappy teenager whose imagination and emotion cannot find expression As Louisa grows older, she agrees to marry Bounderby – who is twice her age – only to be in a position to help her brother Tom, a selfish and unscrupulous young man who works at Bounderby’s bank and proves to be an efficient, unreliable employer. Louisa is unhappy because she is trapped in a loveless marriage, and she becomes vulnerable to the seduction of a handsome young politician, James Harthouse, who has been sent to Coketown to conduct a government survey. It looks as though she is willing to leave her husband for him, but in fact she returns to her father’s house. Sissy acts as a sister to Louisa: she meets Harthouse and tells him that he will never see Louisa again. In the meantime it is discovered that the bank has been robbed, and the blame falls on Stephen Blackpool, an honest worker who has left Coketown. Blackpool returns to prove his innocence, but he falls down a mine shaft and dies. Before long it comes out that Tom is the robber. Gradgrind is devastated when he realizes that ruined his daughter’s life and that his son is a criminal. Tom is arrested, but manages to escape abroad, catches a fever overseas, and dies. CHARLES DICKENS Bounderby loses his reputation and finally shows his real face, he will die of a stroke five years later. Louisa finds comfort in Sissy’s happy marriage and children, and Gradgrind, who is a good man at heart, finds his own humanity and asks forgiveness of his daughter. Riassunto breve: It is one of the most famous stories written by Dickens. It took place in an invented town called Coketown. It was a town of black bricks, even if the would have been red, but the smoke cancelled their color, so it was a town of unnatural red. People seem a black canal that run in the city and never stopped. He atmosphere was broken by a trembling all day long because the piston of steam-engine always worked. Workers repeated the same action every day throughout all the hours of work and it created a sense of monotony and alienation. Every day was the same as the previous one. Dickens denounce the dehumanizing effects of industrial society because it was led by material gain and business. He thought that life wasn’t only made of facts and figures, but also of emotions like love, irrationality and imagination. The town represented the typical industrial town of northern England, but at the same time it was a symbol of poverty of working classes. He described also the Victorian society because workers were poor and nobody helped them. COKETOWN This extract deals with the description of the industrial centre Coketown, where the whole story is set and where Mr Gradgrind and his friend Mr Bounderby are now walking. This town is considered a triumph of facts, it is a town of red bricks, which are not red anymore because of the smoke and pollution which has made them black, they are compared to the painted face of a savage, that gives the idea of danger and chaos. It's also a town of tall chimneys and machinery out of which serpents of smoke come out, image which conveys the idea of a very polluted town. The pistons of the engines in the factories are compared to a mad elephant's head: this means that the huge machines could become dangerous and kill people. The process of industrialization is harshly criticized and seen as something evil, indeed these three images share the common ground of the jungle, therefore industrialization is like war, chaos and danger. These three images add an even gloomier touch to the description of the city, which is composed by many streets, either large or small, but all of them looked the same, moreover the buildings looked all the same and even though they were made of red bricks, they turned black because of pollution, just like the canal's water turned purple. This description is gloomy also because of the rich and vivid imagery used. Everything in Coketown is based on facts and look alike: there is no difference between a jail, an hospital and a town-hall, all the buildings are square, made of red bricks painted black and white, which gives a sense of monotony. In Coketown people are alienated, they all live in the same houses, walk the same streets at the same time, work in the same place and do the same things everyday. According to the narrator's description, the inhabitants' expression and way of living communicate the monotony and sadness of life in this town. People have lost their personality and individuality: they are equally like one another and look like machines. The first part of the description is based on the lower classes, while the second part is based on the comforts of the upper ones. Indeed, in the first part it deals with pollution and dirt, while in the second one it deals with the comforts and elegance of life, which gives an idea of the well-off life conditions opposed to the exploitation and precarious ones of the lower class. The narrator focuses on the indifference and contempt of the upper class towards the lower one, indeed he states that fine ladies couldn't even bear to hear the place mentioned. This is an example of Victorian compromise, which shows a hypocrite and superficial attitude, indeed the life of those who bought the goods becomes more comfortable and elegant, while both Coketown and its people don't look so.