Scarica CHARLES DICKENS + oliver twist e hard times e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHARL DICKENS (1812-1870) Charles Dickens was regarded as the most famous writer in English country during the Victorian Age. He was born in 1812, in Portsmouth and he had an unhappy childhood. His father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. When the family finances improved and his father was released, he was sent to a school in London. And when he was 15 he was employed as an apprentice and he became a successful journalist. He was a prolific novelist, social and humanitarian but also a parliamentary reporter and a brilliant journalist. ➤NOVELS In 1833 his first story appeared and in 1836, still a newspaper reporter, he adopted the pen name “Boz”, publishing “Sketches by Boz’, a collection of articles and tales describing London’s people and scenes. It was immediately followed by The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers), which was published in instalments and revealed Dickens’s humoristic and satirical qualities. NOVELS OF FORMATION: The protagonists of his autobiographical novels became the symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories - Oliver Twist (1838) - David Copperfield (1850) - Little Dorrit (1857) SOCIAL NOVELS: which dealt with conditions of the poor and factory workers - Bleak House (1853) - Hard Times (1854) - Great Expectations (1861) ➤ATTITUDE TOWARDS SOCIETY He gradually developed a more radical social view, although he did not become a revolutionary thinker. He was aware of the spiritual and material corruption of daily reality under the impact of industrialism; the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards his society. In fact, in his mature works Dickens succeeded in drawing popular attention to public abuses, evils and wrongs by mingling terrible descriptions of London misery and crime with the most amusing sketches of metropolitan life. ➤CHARACTERS He used humorous and pictures caricatures, generally members of middle and lower classes, the protagonist are mostly children who were involved in mines, factories, domestic servants, and flower sellers. Children, who were generally considered minor figures in literature, were often the most important characters in Dickens’s novels. They were innocent and wise creatures, virtuous heroes corrupted by unworthy adults, they were deprived of their education, imagination and spontaneity. In Dickens’s novels they are seen as models of behavior for the grownups, they are often orphans who undergo a number of misfortunes and finally gain redemption, they are given to families and become respectable. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits as well as language of the London middle and lower classes. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast and the working class. And also he wanted to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems without offending his middle-class readers and so without causing rebellion. ➤STYLE Hyperbolic language so he uses a number of exaggerations, contrasting adjectives and ironic remarks. We can also find antithetical images and ideas like boy’s world and adult’s adults, submission and power and poor/rich. -OLIVER TWIST- - Oliver Twist is a humanitarian novel and it deals with the exploited childhood in Victorian England. So it is a sentimental story which exposes the evil and the injustices of Victorian society. - Against the background of a degraded London he investigates the miserable conditions of the poor and the underworld of crime and violence where they lived. - In the workhouses children were malnourished,forced to hard labour, and were denied their dignity and liberty. The parishes who ran workhouses abused their power and pocketed the money reserved for children, they maltreated them. - It first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later published as a book. It fictionalized the insecurities, the humiliation and the sufferings Dickens experienced as a child. The name Twist, given to Oliver by accident, represents the reversals of fortune he will experience ➤PLOT Oliver Twist is a poor boy of unknown parents; he was born in a workhouse in a small town near London in the early 1800s. His mother dies almost immediately after his birth and he is brought up in a workhouse in an inhuman way. The boy commits the unpardonable offence of asking for more food when he is close to starving, so the parish official (Mr. Bumble) offers five pounds to anyone who will take the boy away from the workhouse. In fact, he is later sold to an undertaker (Mr.Sowerberry), but the cruelty and the unhappiness he experiences with his new master make him run away to London. Outside London, Oliver meets a boy his own age who offers him shelter in the London house of his benefactor, Fagin. It turns out that Fagin is a career criminal who trains orphan boys to pick pockets for him. Unfortunately, Oliver is not a successful student: he is caught in his first attempt at theft. Mr Brownlow, the victim, takes Oliver to his home and nurses him back to health, but he is eventually kidnapped by Fagin’s gang and he is forced to commit burglary. During the job Oliver is shot by a servant of the house. Oliver is adopted by Mr Brownlow and at last receives kindness and affection. Investigations are made about who Oliver is and it is discovered that he has noble origins. In the end the gang of pickpockets and Oliver’s half-brother, who paid the thieves in order to ruin Oliver and have their father’s property all for himself, are arrested. ➤SETTING The most important setting of the novel is London, which is depicted at three different social levels. - the world of workhouses, which belongs to the society’s lower middle class; - the criminal world, that is described through pickpockets and murders. It is poverty that drives people to commit criminal activities. It was common for children to be part of a criminal gang, to use weapons and violence; - the world of the Victorian middle class, that includes respectable people, such as Mr. Brownlow. -HARD TIM- A social novel which denounces the dangers of Utilitarianism →a philosophical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham at the beginning of the 19th century and which was later developed by John Mill. According to this theory an action is useful and ethically right if it procures happiness (intended as economic advantage) to the greatest number of people. Materialistic point of view: it was based on the principle of intrinsic value: an action is good regardless, the end justifies the means, theft and lies are admitted when they are aimed at the pursuit of self-satisfaction + Dickens points out the gap between the rich (the factory owners who exploited the labourers) and the poor (the factory workers who were forced to work for long hours); He reveals the evils of the Victorian education system which revolved around strict and authoritarian methods. It disregarded students’ emotions, imagination and creativity and it was based on facts, statistics and corporal punishments.