HARD TIMES – CHARLES DICKENS, Esercizi di Inglese

Scarica HARD TIMES – CHARLES DICKENS e più Esercizi in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! UDA ED. CIVICA: HARD TIMES – CHARLES DICKENS Dickens is probably the most representative literary figure of the whole Victorian age. He is the first truly urban novelist. Most of his novels are set in the city of London, and in them he captures the incredible variety and vitality of life in the city, as well as the squalor and deprivation. Dickens’s characters give voice to the whole panorama of social classes. Dickens is also fiercely critical of certain aspects of the Victorian way on life such as the voraciousness and hypocrisy of the rich, and their indifference to the problems of the poor. One of his most popular works is Hard Time written in 1854. This novel is a powerful accusation of some of the effects of industrial society. Dickens is not satisfied by industrialization, which he considers a retrograde step because of the destruction of environment it brings. He shows the negative effects of industrialization. In this novel Dickens describes Coketown, an imaginary industrial town in the north of England. Write the characteristics of Coketown which highlight the issues related to industrialism. The description of Coketown, and the lives of the people who work there, reveal Dickens's indignation at what he regarded as the ugliness, squalor and materialism of the new industrial age. He accuses: -Social and economical system -Factory owners -The mentality: in fact the Victorians were proud of industrialization’s effects and of their achievements; they were satisfied by their progress (which is in contrast with primitive forms of live). Dickens depicts life in a fictive town called Coketown as a symbol for a typical industrial town in Northern England of that time. The name of the city is a clear reference to the coke, the residual of the process of burning of the coal, and using this name he forces in the imagination of the readers the colour of the city itself, which is grey as the coat of smoke that invades its air, due to pollution produced from the factories. This grey colour is in all the facilities, in all the factories, on every wall of the city as a constant of the city life, even the people looks grey, but meaning their unhappy situation, conditioned by the hard work and the underpayed salary.