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Charles Dickens - Coggle Diagram
Charles Dickens
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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.Success with autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1849-50), Little Dorrit (1857).
• Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860-61) set against the background of social issues.
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Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London.
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• London is depicted at three different social levels:
- the parochial world of the workhouses.
4: 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 peculiar 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. Family, childhood and poverty . the subjects to which he returned time & again. 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 life created by the adult world.
Dickens tried to get 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 horrors of factory employment (David Copperfield, Hard Times)
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5:
Dickens’s style: It is a “denunciation novel”: a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of industrial society.
The setting: Coketown, an imaginary industrialised town
Characters: people living and working in Coketown, like the protagonist Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistic.
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