====== Charles Dickens: Notes ======


  * 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 with the pen name Boz
  * In 1836 Sketches by ‘Boz’, articles about London people and scenes, were published in installments
  * The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, became symbols of an exploited childhood
  * Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations set against the background of social issues
  * Busy editor of magazines
  * Died in 1870
  * Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London
  * Depicted the city’s society 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
      * Detailed description of seven dials, a notorious slum district -> its sense for disorientation and confinement is clearly expressed in Dickens’s novels
  * Characters
    * Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel
    * The 18th-century realistic upper middle-class world was replaced by the 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.
  * Aim
    * Dickens tried to persuade the common intelligence of the country to alleviate social sufferings.
    * He was a acampaigning novelist and his books highlight all the great Victorian controversies:
      - The faults of the legal system -> Oliver Twist, Bleak House
      - The horrors of factory employment -> David Copperfield, Hard Times.
      - Scandals in private schools -> David Copperfield
      - The appalling living conditions in the slums -> Bleak House
  * Style
    * Dicken’s style -> 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’s 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 fictionalizes the humiliations Dickens experienced during his childhodd
  * The protagonist Oliver Twist is always innocent and pure and remains incorruptible throughout the story
  * The setting is London.

===== Hard Times =====

  * Dickens attacked:
    * social evils such as poor houses, unjust courts and the criminal underworld
    * workhouses (poverty being equated to laziness)
    * officials of the workhouses (abused the right of the poor as individuals and caused them further misery)
  * It is a ‘denunciation novel’ -> a powerful accusation of some of the negatve effects of the industrial society.
  * The setting -> the fictional city of Coketown, which stands for a real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century Victorian England (e.g. Manchester)
  * Characters -> people living and working in Coketwon, like the protagonist who believes in facts and statistics.
    * His school tries to turn children into little machines that behave according to such rules.
  * A commonly-repeated word is “Facts”
  * Themes:
    * A critique of materialism and Utilitarianism:
      * a denunciation of the ugliness and squalor of the new industrial age;
      * the gap between the rich and the poor.
  * Aim -> to illustrate the dangers of allowing people to become like machines and to suggest that without compassion and imagination, life would be unbearable.
  * 

===== Ex. 1@39 =====

  - insecurity
  - experienced
  - reversals
  - unknown
  - brought up
  - starving
  - undertaker
  - cruelty
  - run away
  - pickpockets
  - caught
  - stricken
  - charging
  - kidnapped
  - burglary
  - wounded
  - Investigations