Charles Dickens
Life
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 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.
Busy editor of magazines.
Died in 1870.
The setting of
Dickens’s novels
Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London
London 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 of ‘Seven Dials’, a notorious slum district: its sense of 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 campaigning 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.
The miseries of prostitution
Corruption in government: Bleak House
Style
Dickens’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’ features;
exaggeration of the characters’ faults;
suspense at the end of the episodes or introduction of a sensational event to keep the readers’ interest.
Dickens’s universality
Dickens’s work
transcends his time,
language and culture.
Dickens’s legacy: He was the man who invented the idea of a white Christmas.
‘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.
Modern character comedy: the comic potential of the way his characters talk.
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.