Scarica Charles Dickens+ Oliver twist+ hard times e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 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 . -The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838) became the symbols of an exploited childhood. - Hard Times (1854) set against the background of social issues. -Died in 1870. THE SETTING 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. - Dickens’s novels were influenced by Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes, gothic novels CHARACTERS Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel. The 18th-century realistic, upper-middle-class world was replaced by 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 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. GOAL 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) 2. The horrors of factory employment (Hard Times) 3. Scandals in private schools 4. The appalling living conditions in the slums STYLE Dickens’s style is 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 This Bildungsroman (an ‘education’ novel) appeared in installments 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 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. He attacked the social evils of his time, such as poor houses. HARD TIMES It is a ‘denunciation novel’ , a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of industrial society. The setting is the fictional city of Coketown, which stands for a real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century Victorian England. Characters: people living and working in Coketown, like the protagonist Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics. His school tries to turn children into little machines that behave according to such rules. Themes: a critique of materialism and Utilitarianism; a denunciation of the
