Charles Dickens - Summary PDF

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CHARLES DICKENS LIFE AND MAIN WORKS Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth (south England) in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory at the age of 12 (his father went in prison for debts). He found employment as a shorthand reporter for a lawyer’s office (parliamentary debates) and then, he became a newspaper reporter with the pen name Boz. In 1836 Sketches by ‘Boz’ (i.e. The Pickwick Papers), articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments. After this great success he started a full-time career as a novelist (writing became a profession  serialized novels: published by instalments on the newspaper), although he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), Litle Dorrit (1857), became the symbols of an exploited childhood, indeed he based his stories on his personal working experience. Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861) set against the background of social issues, and deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. He died in 1870.

THE SETTING OF DICKENS’S NOVELS Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London, which is depicted 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

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. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits, as well as the language. 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; children are often the most important characters. Dickens reverses the natural order of things: children become the moral teachers instead of the taught, the examples instead of the imitators.

THEMES The main themes are 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 His aim is didactic: he tried to persuade the common intelligence of the country to alleviate the social sufferings; he wanted the wealthier classes acquired knowledge about their poorer neighbours. He was a campaigning novelist and his book 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

NARRATIVE Dickens’s novels were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes, by the 18 th-century novelists ad by Gothic novels. His plots are well-planned even if at times they appear a bit artificial, sentimental and episodic. London was the setting of most of his novels: he gradually developed a more radical social view, although he didn’t become a revolutionary thinker.

STYLE Dickens’s style is very rich and original. He employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and character. 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’ features -exaggeration of the characters’ fault -suspense at the end of the episodes or introduction of a sensational event to keep the readers’ interest

OLIVER TWIST Oliver Twist first appeared in instalments in 1837 and was later (1838) published as a book. It is a “mirror of the times”, it reflects the reality of London in that period. The novel fictionalises the economic insecurity and humiliation Dickens experienced as a child. The name “Twist”, though is given to the protagonist by accident, represents the outrageous reversals of fortune that he will experience. The protagonist, Oliver Twist, is always innocent and pure and remains incorruptible throughout the novel. At the end he is saved from a life of villainy by a well-to-do family. The setting is London. Dickens attacked: -the social evils of his times such as poor houses, unjust courts and the underworld -the world of the workhouses founded upon the idea that poverty was a consequence of laziness -the officials of the workhouses because they abused the right of the poor as individuals and caused them further misery -the criminal world, pickpockets and murderers: poverty drives them to crime and the weapon they use to achieve their end is violence; they live in dirty, squalid slums with fear

-the world of the Victorian middle class in which people show a regard for moral values and believe in the principle of human dignity TEXT: OLIVER WANTS SOME MORE The extract from Oliver Twist takes place in a workhouse and denounces the boys’ greatest problem, hunger. One evening the boys decide that one of them, Oliver Twist, should ask for more food. At his insistent demand for more food, the master hits Oliver and goes to look for Mr Bumble, the main in charge of the workhouse. Every member of the parish board is astonished and considers Oliver’s request as a sign of his criminal nature. Therefore, the boy is confined to his room and five pounds are offered to anyone who wants to take him away. The story is developed in a simple language with narration and dialogues and short phrases. The description is ironical to underline the absurdness and the exaggeration of the world of the workhouse; it is also detailed to give us the precise idea of the situation. The function of the narration is to lead the reader to a precise interpretation given also by dialogues. This extract reveals Dickens’s awareness of the social problems of his time, like the malnutrition of the children and their bad conditions, or the contraposition between the thin children and the fat and healthy upper-class people. There is a contraposition between the long grace and the little quantity of food. At the end there are two possible interpretations: everybody agrees with what the master said, or nobody dares to disagree.

HARD TIMES Hard Times is a ‘denunciation novel’, so it is a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of the industrial society. The setting is the fictional city of Coketown, which stands for a real industrial mill town in mid-19th-century Victorian England. The characters are people living and working in the city, like the protagonist Thomas Grandgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics. His school tries to turn children into little machines that behave according to such rules. The themes are 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. The main aim is to illustrate the dangers of allowing people to become like machines and to suggest that without compassion and imagination, because life would be unbearable.

TEXT: COKETOWN Coketown, which is a fictional name, indeed coke is a type of coal (so it is associated with black), is a town that should be a modern city (symbol of progression), because of the factories, but in fact, throughout the description it seems to be a monotonous city of regression (alienation) of the human kind. It contained factories, buildings one like the other, and people whose action are repetitive. From the beginning it seems to be a modern city, because there are the first buildings of bricks (red), but they are black thanks to the pollution; so, it is a town of unnatural red and black, like the painting of a savage. The simile shows how an industrial town, which should represent progress, is compared to a painting of a savage, which represents regress. Similarly, a piston, which should represent progress, is compared to an elephant, which itself is a primitive animal.

This description gives us the idea of the bad and unhealthy conditions of life, caused by the continuous production of smoke from the chimneys, of the melancholy and alienation of man. The negative impression of the city is given also by the repetition of some and one like the other, which coveys the idea of monotony of life, and by the representation of the uniformity of the city. Everything that people do must be useful: there is a contraposition between the lady who wears elegancies, products of the workers. Also, the name of the school, M’Choakumchild, - made up like ‘choke the child’ – refers to the suffocation of children’s imagination. -Colours (sight): black, red and purple -Sounds (earing): rattling and trembling of machinery, -sounds of footsteps on the pavement -Smells (smell): ill-smelling dye

BAD QUALITY OF LIFE POLLUTION

The narrator is a 3rd person one, omniscient, obtrusive. The similes (savage, elephant) and the metaphor (serpents), share the semantic field of animals, and criticise the procession of industrialisation (Dickens want to suggest if the world is really progressing). Dickens in this passage wants to criticise the utilitarianism, according to which an action is morally right if it has consequences that lead to happiness, and wrong if it brings about the reverse....