Dickens’s life

·       Born in Portsmouth in 1812.

·       Unhappy childhood: when his father went bankrupt he had to leave school and was forced to work in a blacking factory at the age of 12 (his father went to prison for debts).

·       He became a clerk in a lawyer’s office

·       Then became a journalist and a newspaper reporter.

·       He also became a lecturer

·       In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth but they separated in 1856. He fell in love with Ellen Ternan, a girl of 18 years old.

·       In 1836 Sketches by Boz, articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments.

·       Successful autobiographical novels: Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1849-50), Little Dorrit (1857).

·       Novels centred upon social issues: Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854), Great Expectations (1860-61). 

·       Busy editor of magazines.

·       Died in 1870.

The settings

• Dickens set many of his great novels in cities, especially London.

Slums such as “Seven Dials”, are described in detail with a sense of disorientation, confinement and emargination.

 

However, the description of repugnant objects is always replaced by generic terms such as "dirt, grime, filth" or by a redundancy of adjectives.

 

 

• The people in London belong to the:
a) working class and are often murderers, pickpockets, people generally living in squalid slums.

b) lower middle class and gravitate around orphanages and workhouses and many of them belong to the parochial world.

c) Victorian middle class. They are often respectable people believing in human dignity.

The characters

Dickens’s characters often belong to the lower orders and not to the upper middle class as it was the case with the protagonists of the 18th-century novel.

He depicted Victorian society in all its variety, its richness and its squalor.

The crimes committed were murders and theft but rape was hardly mentioned as any association to sex was avoided.

His sympathy always went to the poor, the outcast, the member of the working-class.

Dualism - Dickens created "specular characters" i.e. characters respectively symbolizing good and evil.

Flat characters - In his early works he mainly conceived flat characters but from 1850 he began to sketch round ones. Characters were drawn from the observation of real people but there generally was no psychological speculation as his interest was for the external qualities and not for the inner life of his characters.
He often exaggerated and ridiculed peculiar social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest classes thus resulting in caricatures. His female characters often appear weak and flat.

The characters

 

Children - Dickens is said to have portrayed two types of children:

a) the sentimental and idealised child is uncorrupted, over- responsible, very religious and conceives death as a sort of Eden (Oliver Twist, Little Dorrit).

b) The realistic child is described more accurately and originates directly from Dickens’s experiences. He does not have a clear conception of death and tends to live in his present (David Copperfield and Pip)

 

Main themes in Dickens’s novels

·       Family ties and relationships

·       childhood (Dickens’s children are either innocent or corrupted by adults)

·       Exploitation of child labour

·       Repressive school system

·       Dominant role of money

·       Poverty especially amongst the proletarians in large industrial cities

·       Pollution caused by industrialisation

·       Alienation caused by work conditions

 

Dickens’s purpose in writing

Dickens wanted to shed light on Victorian controversies such as:
a) the appalling working conditions in factories (David Copperfield, Hard Times);
b) The faults of the legal system (Oliver Twist);
c) Private education (David Copperfield);
d) Alienation and modernity (Hard Times, Bleak House)
e) The miseries of prostitution (Oliver Twist);
f) The appalling living conditions in slums (Bleak House)
g) Corruption in institutions (Bleak House)

By doing so, he wanted to get his readers to focus on social sufferings and create a new sensibility.

 

The style

The main stylistic features in Dickens’s style are:

1. Use of long lists of objects and people;
2. Grouping adjectives either in pairs or in groups.
3. Piling up details, at times not strictly necessary.
4. Use of repetitions of the same word cluster or structure. 

5. Rephrasing the same concepts over again.
6. Use of antithetical images in characterisation.
7. Exaggeration of the characters’ faults (caricature). 

8. Sensationalism or suspense at the end of the episodes to keep the readers’ interest.
9. Happy endings resolving all contradictions.

 

Dickens’s novels: pros and cons

Flaws:
1.The earlier plots lack a real organic unity and are too full of unlikely events.
2.The main characters are often superficially portrayed.
3.At times, there is an excessive sentimentalism.
4.The comic scenes are often exaggerated.
5.The tragic scenes are often too melodramatic.

Merits:
1.Dickens’s powerful imagination has created an endless number of incidents and intricate plots which capture the readers’ attention.
2.His characters with their peculiarities, phobias and eccentricities cover a wide range.
3.His style is very effective.
4.His use of symbolism is striking.
5.He contributed in creating a new sensibility in the people of his age.

Oliver Twist is a so called bildungsroman (romanzo di formazione) which appeared in instalments in 1837.

•It is largely autobiographical and refers to the humiliations Dickens went through during his childhood.

•The protagonist is depicted as thoroughly innocent and pure and remains incorruptible throughout the novel.

•The novel has a happy ending in which Oliver is saved from a life of villainies by a well-to-do family.

•It is set in London.

Through Oliver Twist Dickens denounced:
• some of the social problems of his age such as poverty, corruption, an unfair legal system and an underworld of thieves.

• the hypocrisy of the world of the workhouses which saw poverty as the consequence of laziness.

• the hypocrisy of its officials because they were disrespectful of the rights of children and of poor people in general and caused them further misery instead of helping them.

 

David Copperfield is the most autobiographical of all Dickens’s novels and in its preface he wrote: “... like many fond parents, I have in my heart a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield”.

• As far as narrative technique is concerned, it is a Bildungsroman in which David, the protagonist, is the narrator.

•The characters are both realistic and romantic and their psychology is vividly characterised.

• The atmosphere is a sort of combination between realism and enchantment. 

•The themes cover areas such as: the struggle for survival of the weak ones in Victorian society, strict education, cruelty to children, the living conditions of poor people

 

Hard Times is a so called “denunciation novel” a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of industrial society.

It is set in Coketown, an imaginary industrialised town which resembled many new industrial areas of the north of England

The characters are people living and working in Coketown,
One of the protagonists is Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics.

 

The themes cover the following areas:

·       a critique of Materialism and Utilitarianism;

·       ugliness and squalor of the new industrial age;

·       alienation of the modern way of living;

·       the gap between the rich and the poor.

The didactic aim is to warn against the dangers of an ever mechanised society based on efficiency which turns people into machines.

 

 Utilitarianism

• Man's actions are driven by the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain
• Actions are morally right or wrong depending on their effects.
• Institutions are good if they are useful for the material happiness of the people. It is in the light of reason that they should be judged.
• Religion is an old fashioned superstition: only what can be seen, touched, measured can be tackled.
• They reject moral codes in which commands or taboos based on customs, traditions or religion clash with a rational and materialistic view of the world.