Scarica Charles Dickens: life, Hard Times and Oliver Twist. 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 went to prison(*) and at the age of 12 he had to start working in a factory; when the family finances improved he was sent to a school in London. He also found a work as an office boy and studied shorthand at night. By 1832 he had become a very successful shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In 1833 he published his first story and in 1836 he adopted the name “Boz”. His stories revealed his humoristic and satirical qualities. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth and became editor of Bentley’s Miscellany. After the publication of “The Pickwick Papers”, Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist. But he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, became the symbols of an exploited childhood. In Bleak House, Hard Times and Great Expectations, he described the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. He died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Why Charles Dickens can be regarded as the emblem of the age? • He experienced the exploitation of the children in factories • He was an example of self-made man: thanks to his hard work he became more and more famous and at the end of his life he was one of the richer man in England • He adopted the new method of publication: instalments He devoted a lot of time and money to philanthropy, but he had a contradictory life: after many years of marriage he left his wife and children and felt in love with a young lover; at the beginning he tried to hide their relationship to maintain his respectability. He always stood on the side of the poor: he wasn’t a revolutionary, he simply wanted the conditions of the poor to improve and wanted to make the ruling class aware of the social problems without offending his middle-class readers. People usually did not care about what is written in the story as long as they find some kind of connection between the story and their life. To make people aware of the conditions of the poorer, Dickens hides the moral message under a sarcastic tone and by showing to the richer what could happen to everybody in a different situations. *There was a law, according to which people who couldn’t support economically their families were forced to join the workhouse: an association administrated by the church. In these houses families were separated and the nuns allowed people to stay with their families very rarely. Every member of the family had to work just like in a factory, but they did not received a salary because the church gave them accommodation and food, but very little food. The middle-classes had always been puritanical and they believed in predestination: if you have been chosen you have a successful life. Instead, if you are poor, you did not work enough, you are lazy and this is your fault. • TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE HE HAD AS A CHILD: he had to leave school because of economical-problems and his father was imprisoned for debt and all the family joined his father in prison except from Charles who worked in a factory. He will never forget his suffering, so he had compassion for the victims of social injustices, especially if they were children. • HIS LIFE AS AN EXAMPLE OF THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE: He was interested in trying to help the world, but he was not a good husband or father so his life was as contradictory as the whole age. • HIS BIG AMBITION WAS TO EDUCATE SOCIETY ABOUT ITS FAILINGS THROUGH ENTERTAINMENT, not using moral and boring ways: he used fun, humour, racy plots (fast and complicated), chatty style, clownish characters, weeping moments, happy endings. • THE PURPOSE OF HIS NOVELS was to fix the problems of the world not by putting forward any specific schemes of reform or working out what alternative politics could be implemented but by shaping a new climate of feelings and opinions, so that his readers would demand for new laws and reforms. HARD TIMES
