Scarica Charles Dickens + Oliver Twist's plot e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHARLES DICKENS FEATURES OF DICKENS’ NOVELS Dickens is considered as the greatest novelist in the English language and the dominant literary figure of the Victorian Age. His novels were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, by the 18th century novelists and by Gothic novels. His plots are well-planned, even if at times they appear a bit artificial, sentimental and episodic. London was the setting of most of his novels: he knew it and described it in realistic details. At the beginning of his literary career he focused on the vices and virtues of the middle and upper classes and created memorable characters, often satirized and with several caricatural features, like in “The Pickwick Papers”. He gradually developed a more radical social view, although he didn’t become a revolutionary thinker. He was aware of the spiritual and material corruption caused by industrialism; the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards his contemporary society. In his mature works, Dickens succeeded in drawing popular attention to the evils and wrongs of society and dealt with issues like education, industrial exploitation, child labour and crime. In his novels, he succeeded in revealing the darkest side of Victorian society, thus becoming a critic of his times. To portray his vivid and realistic characters and social settings, Dickens often found inspiration in his own life experience. He knew from personal experience the life led in factories and the routine in the offices and he gave a detailed description of British homelife, of school systems, of the domestic life of lower and middle-class people. We can say that he was the reporter of the habits and life of an age. CHARACTERS Dickens was the creator of characters and caricatures who live immortally in the English imagination: Mr. Pickwick, Mr. Gradgrind, Scrooge and many others. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits, as well as the language of the middle and lower classes of London. He was always on the side of the poor people, the outcast and also of the working class. Children are often the most important characters in Dickens’s novels. By giving instances of good, wise children are opposed to worthless parents and hypocritical adults, he reverses in fiction the natural order of things: children become the moral teachers instead of the taught. A DIDACTIC AIM Dickens’s novels are defined as social or humanitarian, because he used fiction to denounce the evils of his contemporary society, the brutality of some schools, the vices of the criminal world, the dirt and squalor of London slums and the conditions of the poor in a period of industrial expansion. This didactic aim was very effective, since the result was that the most educated and wealthiest classes acquired knowledge about their poorer neighbors, of whom they previously knew little or nothing. Dickens’s task was never to get the poor to rebel or to induce social revolution, or even encourage discontent, but to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems of the period. STYLE AND LANGUAGE Dickens employed a very effective language and accomplished very powerful, detailed and realistic descriptions of life and characters. He did so with his careful choice of adjectives, repetitions of words and structures, hyperbolic and ironic remarks. LITERARY CAREER Before becoming a novelist, Dickens was a journalist and a reporter of parliamentary debates. In 1836 he adopted the pen name “Boz” and published “Sketches by Boz” a collection of articles and tales describing London’s people and life. This work was followed by “The Pickwick Papers”, which was published in installments and revealed Dickens’s humoristic and satirical qualities. His success continued with his autobiographical novels: “Oliver Twist”, “David Copperfield” and “Little Dorrit”, whose protagonists became the symbols of an exploited childhood and were inspired by the days of suffering that Dickens himself had experienced when he was a boy and was forced to work in a factory at the age of 12. In these novels, in fact, Dickens described the difficult lives of children in slums and factories. Other works include “Bleak House”, “Hard Times” and “Great Expectations”, which deal with the conditions of the poor and of the working class.
