CHARLES DICKENS

LIFE

Dickens was born on the South Coast of England in 1812. He was a son of a clerk in the Navy Pay Office.

•  childhood : At the age of 12 an event marked him deeply: because of debts, his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea (the debtors' prison), and Charles was obliged to leave school and to go working in a blacking factory. This experience contributed to identify himself with the poor and oppressed.

•  education : After four months he left the factory and returned to school.

•  employments:

•  clerk in a lawyers'office;

•  he learnt shorthand and became a parliamentary reporter;

•  journalist.

•  travels: He travelled in America, Switzerland, France and Italy, and he wrote accounts of his journeys.

•  family : He married the daughter of a colleague, Mary Hogarth, but they separated after 22 years. When he was 46 he felt in love with an 18 years old actress, Ellen Ternan, and set-up an establishment for her. But this fact, for his Victorian mind, was often a source of doubt and depression.

•  interests : Dickens was also an amateur actor and theatrical producer.

•  social commitment: He commited himself to a variety of social causes, as the rehabilitation of prostitues or the improvement of London sewerage.

WORKS

He wrote:

•  14 novels : He is the best representative of the Victorian Novel: infact his production is mainly made up of novels, all published in serial form.

•  Oliver Twist : It is the story of an orphan boy. By this novel, Dickens makes a criticism of the workhouse system and denounces the degradation of slum life.

•  Nicolas Nickleby : It is an adventure novel which represents an attack on the mismanagement of private school.

•  The Old Curiosity Shop : It is a pathetic story about the ill-treatment of children in the industrial age.

•  Barnaby Rudge : It is a historical novel set in 18 th century.

•  Martin Chuzzlewit : It was written after Dickens's visit to the United States and it is a satire on American vulgarity.

•  Dombey and Son : It talks about the decline and fall of a capitalist who loses his money but finds his heart.

•  David Copperfield : It is an autobiographical novel, based on his painful experiences during the hard work in factory.

•  Bleak House : This novel is against the law's delays. For this novel he drew from his experience in the Law Courts.

•  Hard Times : It is a denunciation of the wrongs of society and the terrible conditions of industrial workers.

•  Little Dorrit : Is is mainly set in the Marshalsea prison and represents a denunciation of prisoners' sufferings, because they lived in horrible conditions.

•  A Tale of Two Cities : It takes place in London and Paris during French Revolution.

•  Great Expectations : It is considered his masterpiece; it talks about the dramatic experiences of a young boy during his life.

•  Our Mutual Friends : It represents a protest against the poor laws.

•  The Mystery of Edwin Drood : It's a crime story left unfinished because of his death.

FEATURES AND THEMES

•  humour : Dickens had a natural sense of humour. His greatest comic novel is The Pickwick Papers; each episode is pure humour, he put characters in funny situations. His characters are endowed with common sense and with a certain philosophy of life.

•  pathos : Often humour is mingled with pathos: this makes the reader smiling through the tears.

•  characters : Dickens's characters are not heroes and heroines. He drew most of them from reality.

•  portrayat of English life : In Dickens's works sets are always richly detailed, because of the personal observation of the author. He particulary observed the parts of Londons where the poor lived, and he described the British homelife, the school system, the domestic life, the middle-class people, with every detail of manners, appearance and dress.

•  Christmas: In many of his novels we find the recreation of the merry atmosphere, with all the traditional features (music, dancing, the holly, the turkey, the ghost stories).

VALUES

Dickens's novels are defined as social or humanitarian novels , because he used fiction to denounce the injustices of Victorian society. But he didn't suggest any specific means of reform, because he never questioned the basic values of his time. For him the happiness consisted in hard work, romantic love and family life.

LIMITATION AND MERITS

Negative aspects:

•  stories are often too full of unlikely events;

•  main characters are often superficially portrayed;

•  there is an excessive sentimentalism;

•  comic scenes are often exaggerated, so as to become grotesque;

•  too melodramatic tragic scenes.

Positive aspect:

•  his powerful imagination has contributed to create a large number of situations;

•  a large variety of characters, expecially the minor ones;

•  the style is fluent and effective;

•  his occasional use of symbolism is striking;

•  he created vivid and memorable pictures.

REASONS FOR POPULARITY

Charles Dickens is the most representative writer of the Victorian Novel. His typical victorian profile and his genius as a story-teller, made him appreciated by millions of people all over the world.

HARD TIMES , not only illustrated the influence of the Utilitarian doctrine and how it suppresses the spiritual and creative side of human nature but also offered a cutting attack on the inhumanity of an industrial and materialistic society.

" Hard times " explores the related themes of the inhumanity of the factory system and of the utilitarian philosophy.

Though Dickens' (popularity) refused to accept the evils of Victorian society, he was not a revolutionary. He believed that social improvement could be achieved by benevolence, by fellow-feeling and human solidarity.

COKETOWN It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

Charles Dickens, Tempi difficili (1854) , cap. V

"Era una città fatta di mattoni rossi, o meglio di mattoni che sarebbero stati rossi se il fumo e la cenere lo avessero permesso; ma, per come stavano le cose, era una città innaturalmente rossa e nera, come il volto dipinto di un selvaggio. Era una città di macchinari e di lunghe ciminiere, dalle quali strisciavano perennemente interminabili serpenti di fumo, che non si srotolavano mai. C'era anche un canale nero e un fiume che scorreva, arrossato da tinture maleodoranti, e c'erano enormi blocchi di costruzioni piene di finestre in cui si sentiva tutto il giorno un tintinnio tremolante e in cui il pistone della macchina a vapore andava su e giù con monotonia, come la testa di un elefante colto da una pazzia malinconica. La città < Coketown , città del carbone > aveva molte grandi strade tutte uguali luna all'altra e molte piccole strade ancor più uguali l'una all'altra, abitate da persone uguali l'una all'altra, che uscivano ed entravano tutte alla stessa ora, facendo lo stesso rumore sugli stessi marciapiedi, che avevano tutte lo stesso lavoro e per le quali ogni giorno era uguale al giorno precedente e a quello futuro, e ogni anno era la copia dell'anno passata e di quello ancora di là da venire. (...)