Scarica Charles Dickens: Life, Novels, and Themes e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Life : - Born in Portsmouth in 1812. - Unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory at the age of 12 (his father went to prison for debts). - He became a newspaper reporter with the pen name Boz. - In 1836 Sketches by 'Boz', articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments. • The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), Little Dorrit (1857), became the symbols of an exploited childhood. •Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861) set against the background of social issues. •Busy editor of magazines. - Died in 1870. - He was famous in life and he was a poet in the 1° part of the Victorian Age The setting of Dickens's novels : Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London → depicted at three different social levels: • the parochial world of the workhouses → its inhabitants belong to the lower-middle classes; • the criminal world → murderers, pickpockets living in squalid slums, • the Victorian middle class respectable people believing in human dignity. - Detailed description of 'Seven Dials', a notorious slum district its sense of disorientation and confinement is clearly expressed in Dickens's novels. Characters : - Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel. - The 18th-century realistic, upper middle-class world was replaced by the one of the lower orders. - He depicted Victorian society in all its variety, its richness and its squalor. - He created: •caricatures → he exaggerated and ridiculed particular social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest classes; •weak female characters. • He wrote for the middle class for inform them about society's problems • He was on the side of the poor, the outcast, the working-class. Themes : • Family, childhood and poverty. • Dickens's children are either innocent or corrupted by adults. • Most of these children begin in negative circumstances and rise to happy endings which resolve the contradictions in their lives created by the adult world. Aim : - Dickens tried to persuade the common intelligence of the country to alleviate social sufferings. - He was a campaigning novelist and his books highlight all the great Victorian controversies: 1. The faults of the legal system → Oliver Twist, Bleak House. 2. The horrors of factory employment → David Copperfield, Hard Times. 3. Scandals in private schools → David Copperfield. 4. The appalling living conditions in the slums → Bleak House. Style : -Dickens's style → very rich and original. -The main stylistic features of his novels are: • long list of objects and people; • adjectives used in pairs or in groups of three and four; • several details, not strictly necessary; • repetitions of the same words and sentence structures; • the same concepts are expressed more than once, but with different words; • use of antithetical images and ideas in order to underline the characters' features; • exaggeration of the characters' faults; • suspense at the end of the episodes or introduction of a sensational event to keep the readers' interest. Oliver Twist (1838) -This Bildungsroman (an 'education' novel) appeared in instalments in 1837. - It fictionalises the humiliations Dickens experienced during his childhood. - The protagonist, Oliver Twist, is always innocent and pure and remains incorruptible throughout the novel. - At the end he is saved from a life of villainy by a well-to-do family. -The setting is London. Dickens attacked: •the social evils of his times such as poor houses, unjust courts and the underworld; •the world of the workhouses (Poor Law Amendment Act 1834) founded upon the idea that poverty was a consequence of laziness; •the officials of the workhouses because they abused the right of the poor as individuals and caused them further misery.
