Charles Dickens
The writer of the
compromise
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, on
the south coast of England,
in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood since his father was imprisoned for debt.
Charles was put to work in a factory. When his father was released
, Dickens was sent to a school in London.
At fifteen , he found employment as an office boy at
an attorney's , and studied shorthand at night. By 1832 he had become a very successful
shorthand reporter of Parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, and began
to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In 1833 his first story appeared and in
1836, still a newspaper reporter, he adopted the pen name Boz, publishing Sketches
by boy, a collection of articles describing London people and scenes written for the
periodical "Monthly Magazine". It was immediately followed by The Posthumous
Papers of the Pickwick Club, which was published in instalments and revealed
Dickens's humoristic and satirical qualities. After the success of Pickwick,
Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist although he continued his
journalistic and editorial activities. The most important novels are Oliver
twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Martin Chuzzlewit and A Christmas Carol. The
protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist(1838),
David Copperfield(1849-50) and Little Dorrit(1857) became the symbols o fan
exploited childhood confronted with the grim and bitter realities of slums and
factories. Other works include Bleak House(1853),Hard
Times(1854)and Great Expectations(1860-61),dealing with social issues, such as
the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. He spent his last
years living readings of his own work in England,
Scotland, and Ireland, until he died in London in 1870. He was buried at Westminster
Abbey.
Characters
Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel: the 18th-century
realistic upper middle-class word was replaced by that of the lower orders. He
created caricatures, trying to arouse the reader's interest by describing the
characters, habits, and language of the middle and lower classes in modern
London, like lodging-house keepers, shopkeepers, petty tradesmen, whose social
peculiarities, vanity and ambition he ridiculed freely, though without sarcasm.
He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast, and also the working class.
A didactic aim
Children are often the most important characters in Dickens's novels.
Dickens makes children the moral teachers instead of the taught, the examples
instead of the imitators. The novelist's ability lay both in making his readers
love his children, and putting them forward as models of the way people ought
to behave towards one another. Dickens's task was never to induce the most
wronged and suffering to rebel, or even encourage discontent, but to get the
common intelligence of the country, in all its different classes alike, to
alleviate undeniable sufferings.
Dickens's narrative
Dickens was first and foremost a storyteller. His novels were influenced
by the Bible, fairy tales, fables, and nursery rhymes, by the 18th-century
novelists and essayists, and by Gothic novels. His plots are well-ned even
if at times they sound a bit artificial,sentimental,
and episodic. Certainly the conditions of publication in monthly or weekly instalments
discouraged unified plotting and created pressure on Dickens to conform to the
public taste. London
was the setting of most of his novels. He was aware of the spiritual and
material corruption of present-day reality under the impact of industrialism.
In fact, in his mature works Dickens succeeded in drawing popular attention to public
abuses, evils and wrongs by mingling terrible descriptions of London misery and crime with the most amusing sketches of
the town.
