notes on Dickens. Life, works, style

1. • 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
Dickens’s life

2. Dickens’s life
• 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.

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

4. • 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 settings

5. 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.
The characters

6. 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

7. 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)
The characters

8. • 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
Main themes in Dickens’s
novels

9. 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.
Dickens’s purpose in writing

10. 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.
The style

11. 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.
Dickens’s novels: pros and cons

12. 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.
Dickens’s novels: pros and cons

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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

16. 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.