Scarica Riassunto Charles Dickens e Oliver Twist e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! 29 VII. CHARLES DICKENS: OLIVER TWIST Charles Dickens was one of the greatest Victorian novelists, he was deeply influenced by his own childhood experiences, which shaped his future imagery and sympathy for the poor classes, subjects of his social works. The Victorian age (1837-1901) was a period characterized by a particular situation, which saw progress and prosperity on one hand, and poverty and injustice on the other. This situation is called the Victorian Compromise, that was the contradiction between the wealth and enlightenment of the upper classes, and particularly their moral values and the terrible poverty and deprivation of the lower. Dickens was born near Portsmouth in 1812. In 1823 his father was sent to work in London, where the family lived in a dingy suburb. Then his father was imprisoned because he was always in debt and so Charles, who was still a young boy, was obliged to leave school and earn money labbeling bottles in a blacking factory. Then the family fortunes improved through a legacy and charles was sent to an hard and severe school. At fifteen he began to work as a clerk in a lawyer’s office. Then he became a parliamentary reporter and journalist and from 1836 started his literary production, from which he obtained enormous success and notoriety. He died in june 1870 and was buried in Westminister Abbey. ABOUT THE MAIN THEMES OF HIS WORKS He was fascinated by the grotesque and the picaresque, but in particular he was interested in the moral evil, crime and the corruption on society. He is defined social writer due to his so-called humanitarian novels, through which he attacked the evils of his age like the workhouse system and the injustice of Poor Law. Workhouses were places where poor people who had no job or home lived. They earned their keep by doing jobs in the workhouse. Also in the workhouses there were orphaned and abandoned children, the physically and mentally 30 sick, the disabled, the elderly and unmarried mothers. The same interest for poor classes and injustices of the society was shown in Italy by Giovanni Verga with his work Ciclo dei vinti, and in France by Émile Zola with his work Les Rougon- Macquart. But Dickens was also inspired by the theme of the double, he created “specular characters”, symbolizing respectively good and evil, morally different but very similar physically, so alike as to be mistaken from each other. In this sense we could call dickens also a doppelganger writer From the pont of view of Dickens as a social writer, one of his best work is Oliver twist, published in 1837. OLIVER TWIST Oliver twist was published in instalments in 1837 and in a single-volume in 1838. It's a story of poverty, crimes and the horrors of the workhouses and the underworld. This novel is set in London in the early 19th century. Oliver was born in an english workhouse, his mother died in childbirth and he consequentely was entrusted to the orphanage of Mrs. Mann. Then when we was nine years old he was brought back to the workhouse in which he was born. There he spent an unhappy period, starved and brutalized by a man called Mr.Bumble Soon he became a problem for Mr.Bumble that decided to get rid of him. But Oliver was still unhappy and exploited, so he decided to run away and he went to London. In London he met a kid called Charles that introduced him into a band of thieves, led by a man called Fagin. Initially Oliver didn't totally understand what those kids did. He understood that those kids were thieves, during a robbery in which he partecipated. During this robbery he was arrested but after few days he was released because there weren't enough proofs. Then he took fever and Mr. Brownlow, the victim of the robbery, decided to help him and brought Oliver to his house. After few days, while Oliver was doing a commission for Mr.Brownlow, he was kidnapped by the kids of Fagin and Brought back to Fagin and the misterious Monks, about Monks we don't know
