Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
DICKENS’ NOVELS - Coggle Diagram
DICKENS’ NOVELS
PLOTS AND FEATURES
- well-planned plots sometimes a bit artificial and sentimental.
- Published in instalments > close relationship between Dickens and his reading public > conformity to the public taste (sentimental/melodramatic)
- novels set in London - he showed a great knowledge of the city.
- Dickens gradually developed a more radical view of the social problems,
- Not a revolutionary thinker > but his mature novels are a more direct and harsh critique of his society.
- He used Gothic colours to depict the urban slums.
A DIDACTIC AIM
- He believed that the spiritual and material corruption of his contemporary society was a consequence of industrialisation
- His aim was to draw popular attention to public abuses, evils and wrongs of the contemporary society
- He reversed in fiction the natural order of things.
-
- In this way Dickens made his readers love his children, putting them orward as models
- Dickens's aim was never to induce the most wronged and suffering to rebel, but to spread a common awareness of thesocial problems of his country.
CHARACTERS
- Dickens describes the middle and lower, often the very lowest, classes in modern London.
- He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast, and the working class.
- He created caricatures: he tried to attract interest by describing the characters, habits, and language of the different social classes in contemporary London (shopkeepers, petty tradesmen).
- He ridiculed their defects (vanity, meanness), though without sarcasm.