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:
  1. The faults of the legal system → Oliver Twist, Bleak House
  2. The horrors of factory employment → David Copperfield, Hard Times.
  3. Scandals in private schools → David Copperfield
  4. 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