Charles Dickens: 19th Century Novelist - Themes, Characters, Works, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica Charles Dickens: 19th Century Novelist - Themes, Characters, Works e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Charles Dickens is the greatest English novelist of the nineteenth century and one of the most popular in European literature. He sets his works in London, describing it from three points of view: the parish world, the criminal world and the bourgeois world. The characters are: murderers, bourgeois and prostitutes. Dickens described the characters flaws with exaggeration by creating caricatures and used suspense to keep the public’s interest alive. By "Seven Dials", we mean an intersection of seven roads that symbolized the sense of disorientation and confinement. The themes were family, childhood and poverty. Being on the side of the poor, Dickens' intent was to sensitize politicians to change the laws, such as, Education Act and Public Health Act. Coketown Coketown is part of Dickens' masterpiece Hard Times, written in 1854. The characters are the working class and the people who live in this city: Mr. Gradgrind a teacher with two children Louisa and Tom, educated in a rational way. His school was based on facts and statistics, with the intention of turning them into machines. It is set in the fictional town of Coketown. The themes are: the gap between rich and poor, the denunciation of materialism and utilitarianism by J. Bentham and the negative aspects of industrial society in the Victorian era. The purpose of Dickens is to prevent people from becoming machines, because life without imagination and sensitivity would become unbearable. Oliver Twist Oliver Twist is an autobiographical novel published in 1837, in which Dickens attacks the social ills of his time: the underworld and the workhouses, which the latter have not favored means for social progress. Oliver Twist tells the story of a boy of unknown parents, born and educated in the workhouses. He escapes and immediately after he steals hired by a gang corrupted by adults, with the intent to survive. The novel is set in London and describes it from three points of view: the parish world, the criminal world and that of the Victorian middle class. The characters are the Victorians described in their wealth and squalor. The themes are: family, childhood (innocent children and then corrupted by adults) and poverty. Universatility Dickens' work is beyond time. He invented the idea of white Christmas, the real one that consists in making oneself available to those in need, as, for example in "Christmas Carol", there was Scrooge, an old materialist and selfish man, who did not help children altough he was rich, but on Christmas night he will see that life without fundamental values is meaningless . Today, the term invented by Dickens, "Scrooge", represents a person with an evil, petty and greedy mind. We speak of "Dickensian poverty", because Dickens was one of the first to describe the underclass and the poverty stricken in Victorian London. Regarding the cinema, Dickens invented the parallel montage where two stories run alongside each other and the close-up.