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Charles Dickens (Life (Born in Portsmouth in 1812., Unhappy childhood: he…
Charles Dickens
Life
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Unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory at the age of 12 (his father went to prison for debts).
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In 1836 Sketches by ‘Boz’, articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments.
The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850), Little Dorrit (1857), became the symbols of an exploited childhood.
Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1861) set against the background of social issues.
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Characters
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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;
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He was on the side of the poor, the
outcast, the working-class.
Themes
Family, childhood and poverty.
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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.
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Dickens’s universality
Dickens’s work
transcends his time,
language and culture.
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‘Dickensian’ poverty: Dickens was one of the first to describe
the underclass and the poverty stricken in Victorian London. ‘Dickensian’ it has become the easiest word to describe an unacceptable level of poverty.
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The cinema: Dickens was a key and important influence in cinema development. He invented the parallel montage where two stories run alongside each other and the close-up.
Meaningful names: he refined the practice to suggest characters’ traits and their role. Some characters have become so recognisable that they have entered the language as nouns: for example, a scrooge = somebody mean-spirited or lacking in generosity.
Our view of the law: the current view of lawyers seems to be partly inspired by characters such as the menacing lawyer Mr Tulkinghorn in Bleak House.
What remains of the issues highlighted by Dickens: the cost of the legal proceedings, particularly with small civil claims, is bound to exceed the damages that are obtained.