Charles Dickens is a famous representative of critical realism
The Ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of
the Republic of Uzbekistan
Karshi State University
Faculty: Roman-German Philology
207-group II course
Subject: English literature of the XIX century.
Theme: Charles Dickens is a famous representative of critical realism.
Checked by:
Student:
Karshi 2013 year
Plan
Introduction : Victorian age and Critical realism 3-6
Charles Dickens life and literary career
1.1 Biography
1.2 Early years
1.3 Middle years
1.4 Last years
1.5 Death
Literary style of Charles Dickens
2.1 Characters
2.2 Literary techniques
2.3 Dickens’ Critical Realism
Analysis of “Oliwer Twist”
Dickens`s contribution to the English literature 21- 23
Conclusion
Glossary
Used literature and sources
Introduction
The Victorian Period (1836-1901)
The early years of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economic development as well as serious social problems. For a time England was the “workshop of the world.” Toward the mid-century, England had reached its highest point of development as a world power. And yet beneath the great prosperity and richness, there existed widespread poverty and wretchedness among the working class.
Ideologically, the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of science and technology, new inventions and discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology and anthropology drastically shook people’s religious convictions. The religious collision that started from the early nineteenth century continued and was intensified by the disputes over evolutionary science. In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. Among the famous novelists of the time were the critical realists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.
While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th-century realist novel, they carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society and the defence of the mass. Although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice. Their truthful picture of people’s life and bitter and strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems and in the actual improvement of the society. And in the last few decades there were also George Eliot, the pioneering woman who, according to D.H. Lawrence, was the first novelist that “started putting all the actions inside,” and Thomas Hardy, that Wessex man who not only continued to expose and criticize all sorts of social iniquities, but finally came to question and attack the Victorian convention and morals.
The Victorian age also produced a host of great prose writers: Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Babington Cacaulay, Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin and Thomas Henry Huxley.
The poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experiments with new styles and new ways of expression. Among those famous experimental poets was Robert Browning who created the verse novel by adopting the novelistic presentation of characters. Other poets like Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Edward Fitzgerald, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his talented sister Christina, Gerald Manley Hopkins and Algernon Charles Swinburne all made their respective attempts at poetic innovations and helped open up new ways for the twentieth-century modern poetry.
Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represents the reality and spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are all unprecedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values and experiments are to witness their bumper harvest.
GENERAL CHARASTERISTICS OF VICTORIAN LITERATURE
1. - Prose: The beginning of a new kind of prose, the lyric prose, is a prose that not only communicate ideas, it express it beautifully. In this time the readers wanted for advice from authority and some writers provided advise, people needed a guide. E.g. Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, Mathew Arnold. It's full of prepositions because of this didactic style and parallelisms.
2. - Poetry: It was considered superior than prose, novel theatre. They said that the writing of a genius must be poetry. There were two main romantic inheritances in poetry:
1.- the use of retrospective forms: archaic language. They revived many old forms (particularly the mixture of lyric and elegy which influenced others forms like epigram).
2.- experimentation with genres. Some poets continued the movement of colloquial diction into poetry (Robert Browning)
3. - Novel: The main theme is man in society (family, business, friends...). they don't speak abut the past, speak about things that were happening in that time. (Dickens, Brontës).
4. - Drama: Theatre had a little importance (Oscar Wilde, George Bernal Shawn)
THE BRONTËS
- Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)
- Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
- Anne Brontë (1820-1849)
Сritical Realism in England.
“The present brilliant school of novelists in England, whose graphic and eloquent descriptions have revealed more political and social truths to the world than have all the politicians, publicists and moralists added together, has pictured all sections of the middle class, beginning with the “respectable” rentier and owner of government stocks, who looks down on all kinds of “business” as being vulgar, amd finishing with the small shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. How have they been described by Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Gaskell? As full as self-conceit, prudishness, petty tyranny and ignorance. And the cvivilized world confirmed their verdict in a damning epigram which it has pinned on that class, that it was servile to ots social superiors and despotic to its social inferiors.”
In the thirties of the XIX century English capitalism entered a new stage of developmnet. England became a classical capitalist country. At the same time England was experiencing an aggravation of contradictions both at home and abroad. In India and Ireland national-liberation movements were developing while the metropolies itself witnessed a powerful upsurge of labour movement known as Chartism. The period of this tense struggles was attanded by the appearance of a new literary current – critical realism. The critical realism of the 198th century flourished inj the fourties and in the beginning of the fifties.
The greatness of the English realists lies not only in their satirical portrayal of the bougeosie and in the exposure of the greed and hypocrysy of the ruling classes but also in their profound humanism which is revealed in their sympathy for the labouring people. These writers create posirive characters who are quite alien to the vices of the rich and who are chiefly common people. In the best works of the realist writers, the world of greed andf cruelty is contrasted to a world where all the unwritten laws of humanism rule in defiance of all the sorrows and inflections that befall the heroes.
The critical realists of the XIX century didn’t and due to their world outlook couldn’t find a way to eradicate social evils. They strive for no more than improving it by means of reforms which brings them to a futle attempt of trying to reconcile the antagonistic class forces – the bourgeosie and proletariat. The english working class can be, in full justice, called the Chartistr literature, for it developed among the participants of the chartist movement before and after the revolutionary evenys of 1848. The cvhartist writers introduced a new theme into Englishg literature – the struggle of the proletariat for its rights. The second half of ther XIX century in England produced a number of outstanding poets such as Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), Charles Algernon Swinburne (1809-1909) and others.
Durung the Chartist movement numerous Chartist organizations published various newspapers and magazines which, besides articlesd on political and economical issues, contained poems, short stories and novels written by the Chartists themselves. They strove at describing the world as it was seen by the revolutionary workers.
The Chartist poets’ work includes lyrical songs and satires, epical poems ans short epigrams. Heroic and revolutionary in its character, the chartis poetry played an important role in the development of English democratic literature.
Thomas Hood (1799-1845) wrote “Song of the Shirt” (1844), “The brudge of Sighs”.
Ernest Jones (1819-1869), the most gifted of them all, wrote “The Song pf the Lower Classes”, “The Song of the Workingman”. His verses became the anthems of the chartists. Jones is in full justice considered the founder of the revolutionary proletarian literature inngland.
Jerald Massey (1828-1907) created collections “Voices of Freedom” and “Lyrics of Love”.
Among the most popular and productive novelists as Charles Dickens, whose work combined social criticism with comedy and sentiment to create a tone that the world identifies as Victorian. Like Chancer and Shakespeare before him, Dickens enjoyed inventing a vast array of memorable characters in novels such as “Oliver Twist” (1837 - 1839), “A Tale of two Cities” (1859), and “Great Expectations” (1860 - 1861). His heartfelt criticism helped to change British institutions that badly needed reform, especially prisons and schools.
Charles Dickens was the most popular British author of the Victorian AGE, his work is still popular both in print and in dramatic and musical versions. The magic that millions still find in Dickens novels can be traced, at least in part, to the eccentric, colorful array of characters that he created: the gullible Pickwick of “The Pickwic Papers” (1836 - 1837), the villainous Fagin of “Oliver Twist” (1837 - 1839), the pathetic Little Nell of “The Old Curiosity Shop” (1840 - 1841), the miserly Scrooge of “A Christmas Carol” (1843), the shiftless Micawber of “David Copperfield” (1849 - 1850), the honorable Sydney Carton of “A Tale of Two Cities” (1859), the bitter Miss Havisham of “Great Expectations” (1860 - 1861).
BIOGRAPHY of Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters.
Many of his novels, with their recurrent concern for social reform, first appeared in magazines in serialised form, a popular format at the time. Unlike other authors who completed entire novels before serialisation, Dickens often created the episodes as they were being serialized. The practice lent his stories a particular rhythm, punctuated by cliffhangers to keep the public looking forward to the next instalment. The continuing popularity of his novels and short stories is such that they have never gone out of print.
His work has been praised for its mastery of prose and unique personalities by writers such as George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton, though others, such as Henry James and Virginia Woolf, criticised it for sentimentality and implausibility.
Early years
Having spent the first three years of his life in Portsmouth, Hampshire, the family moved to London in 1815. His early
years seem to have been idyllic, although he thought himself a "very
small and not-over-particularly-taken-
This period came to an abrupt end when John Dickens spent beyond his means and was imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtor's prison in Southwark, London. Shortly afterwards, the rest of his family joined him - except Charles, who boarded with family friend Elizabeth Roylance in Camden Town. Mrs. Roylance was "a reduced old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a "back-attic...at the house of an insolvent-court agent...in Lant Street in The Borough...he was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman, with a quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son; these three were the inspiration for the Garland family in The Old Curiosity Shop.
On Sundays, Dickens and his sister Fanny, allowed out from the Royal Academy of Music, spent the day at the Marshalsea. (Dickens later used the prison as a setting in Little Doritt.) To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens began working ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station. He earned six shillings a week pasting labels on shoe polish. The strenuous - and often cruel - work conditions made a deep impression on Dickens, and later influenced his fiction and essays, forming foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigours of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. As told to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens):
The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist.
After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens' paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him the sum of £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was granted release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea for the home of Mrs. Roylance.
Although Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother Elizabeth Dickens did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. 'The incident must have done much to confirm Dickens's determined view that a father should rule the family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back." His mother's failure to request his return was no doubt a factor in his demanding and dissatisfied attitude towards women.' Resentment stemming from his situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield: "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy was not a good school. 'Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield.'
Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. Then, having learned Gurneys system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education informed works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public, and was a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law".
In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris.In 1833, Dickens' first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk was published in the London periodical, Monthly Magazine. The following year he rented rooms at Furnival's Inn becoming a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz, published in 1836. This led to the serialisation of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, in March 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout his literary career.
In 1836, Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, producing Oliver Twist (1837–39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. Dickens had a pet raven named Grip which he had stuffed when it died in 1841. (it is now at the Free Library of Philadelphia).
On 2 April 1836, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816 – 1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they set up home in Bloomsbury. They had ten children:
Charles Culliford Boz Dickens (C. C. B. Dickens), later known as Charles Dickens, Jr., editor of All the Year Round, and author of the Dickens's Dictionary of London (1879). Mary Dickens, Kate Macready Dickens ,Walter Landor Dickens ,Francis Jeffrey Dickens ,Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens
Sydney Smith Haldimand Dickens ,Sir Henry Fielding Dickens
Dora Annie Dickens ,Edward Dickens
Dickens and his family lived at 48 Doughty Street, London, from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17 year old sister Mary moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. She became a character in many of his books, and her death is fictionalised as the death of Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. In 1842, Dickens and his wife made his first trip to the United States and Canada, a journey which was successful in spite of his support for the abolition of slavery. It is described in the travelogue American Notes for General Circulation and is also the basis of some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit. Dickens includes in Notes a powerful condemnation of slavery, with "ample proof" of the "atrocities" he found. He called upon President John Tyler at the White House.
During his visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures, raising support for copyright laws, and recording many of his impressions of America. He met such luminaries as Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. On 14 February 1842, a Boz Ball was held in his honour at the Park Theater, with 3,000 guests. Among the neighbourhoods he visited were Five Points, Wall Street, The Bowery, and the prison known as The Tombs. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until her brother-in-law's death in 1870.Shortly thereafter, he began to show interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he remained an Anglican for the rest of his life. Dickens's work continued to be popular, especially A Christmas Carol written in 1843, which was reputedly a potboiler written in a matter of weeks to meet the expenses of his wife's fifth pregnancy. After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) and Switzerland (1846), Dickens continued his success with Dombey and Son (1848) and David Copperfield (1849–50)In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would write Bleak House (1852–53), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1857). It was here he got up the amateur theatricals which are described in Forster's Life.
Middle years
In 1856, his income from his writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased him.
In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. With one of these, Ellen Ternan, Dickens formed a bond which was to last the rest of his life. He then separated from his wife, Catherine, in 1858 - divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was.
During this period, whilst pondering about giving public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis through a charitable appeal. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked to preside by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West. He threw himself into the task, heart and soul (a little known fact is that Dickens reported anonymously in the weekly The Examiner in 1849 to help mishandled children and wrote another article to help publicise the hospital's opening in 1852). On 9 February 1858, Dickens spoke at the hospital's first annual festival dinner at Freemasons' Hall and later gave a public reading of A Christmas Carol at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church hall. The events raised enough money to enable the hospital to purchase the neighbouring house, № 48 Great Ormond Street, increasing the bed capacity from 20 to 75. That summer of 1858, after separating from his wife, Dickens undertook his first series of public readings in London for pay which ended on 22 July. After 10 days rest, he began a gruelling and ambitious tour through the English provinces, Scotland and Ireland, beginning with a performance in Clifton on 2 August and closing in Brighton, more than three months later, on 13 November. Altogether he read eighty-seven times, on some days giving both a matinée and an evening performance.
Major works, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870).
In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of nearly his entire correspondence. Only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan burned all of his letters as well, the dimensions of the affair between the two were unknown until the publication of Dickens and Daughter, a book about Dickens's relationship with his daughter Kate, in 1939. Kate Dickens worked with author Gladys Storey on the book prior to her death in 1929, and alleged that Dickens and Ternan had a son who died in infancy, though no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, set out to prove that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life, and was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray.
In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, so much that he was one of the early members of The Ghost Club.
Last years
On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Dickens tried to help the wounded and the dying before rescuers arrived. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Typically, Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story The Signal-Man in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He based the story around several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861.
Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest, to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Much of his time was taken up with public readings from his best-loved novels. Dickens was fascinated by the theatre as an escape from the world, and theatres and theatrical people appear in Nicholas Nickleby. The travelling shows were extremely popular. In 1866, a series of public readings were undertaken in England and Scotland. The following year saw more readings in England and Ireland.
On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began and Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park. In New York, he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall between 9 December 1867 and 18 April 1868, and four at Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims between 16 January and 21 January 1868. During his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised to never denounce America again. By the end of the tour, the author could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour.
Death
On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. The next day, on 9 June, and five years to the day after the Staplehurst crash, he died at Gad's Hill Place never having regained consciousness. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner", he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." Dickens's last words, as reported in his obituary in The Times were alleged to have been:Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fullfilled all the rules of art.
On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens's interment in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue."
Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected to honour him. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, is located in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. The couch on which he died is preserved at the Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth.
Literary style of Charles Dickens
Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic romance, although it had already become a target for parody. One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work. His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his characters' names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline, such as Mr. Murdstone in the novel David Copperfield, which is clearly a combination of "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. Dickens is one of the masters of prose, but in a sense that carries qualification. He cannot be compared with
Thackeray for flow of pure idiom, for command of subtle melodies. He is often mannered to the last point ofendurance; he has one fault which offends the prime law of prose composition. For all that, he made uniqueuse of the English language, and his style must be examined as one of the justifications of his place in literature. In the beginning it had excellent qualities; his Sketches are phrased with vigour, with variety, and with a soundness of construction which he owed to his eighteenth−century studies. Dealing for the most part with vulgarity, his first book is very free from vulgarisms. In one of the earliest letters to Forster, he speaks of "your invite"; but no such abomination deforms his printed pages. Facetiousness is now and then to blame for an affected sentence, and this fault once or twice crops up in later books. Someone in Pickwick wears "a grin which agitated his countenance from one auricular organ to the other"; and in Bleak House, when grandfather Smallweed threw his cushion at the old woman, we are told that "the effect of this act of jaculation was twofold". Without much effort Dickens kept clear of such pitfalls; what might have befallen him but for his fine models and his good sense, we may surmise from the style of certain of his more or less conscious imitators, Slovenly English he never wrote; the nature of the man made it impossible. And in this respect he contrasts remarkably with all save the greatest of his day. ". But Dickens respected both himself and his public never a common virtue in the everyday English novelist.
Characters
Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man and thus create characters to whom readers could relate. Beginning with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves."
Dickensian characters—especially their typically whimsical names—are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep and many others are so well known and can be believed to be living a life outside the novels that their stories have been continued by other authors.The author worked closely with his illustrators supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy." This close working relationship is important to readers of Dickens today. The illustrations give us a glimpse of the characters as Dickens described them. Film makers still use the illustrations as a basis for characterisation, costume, and set design.Often these characters were based on people he knew. In a few instances Dickens based the character too closely on the original, as in the case of Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, based on Leigh Hunt, and Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield, based on his wife's dwarf chiropodist. Indeed, the acquaintances made when reading a Dickens novel are not easily forgotten. The author, Virginia Woolf, maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks."
Literary techniques
Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as incredibly moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of little Nell." (although her death actually takes place off-stage). In 1903 G. K. Chesterton said, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to."
In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).Dickens also employs incredible coincidences (e.g., Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of eighteenth century picaresque novels such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed so much. But, to Dickens, these were not just plot devices but an index of the humanism that led him to believe that good wins out in the end and often in unexpected ways.
Dickens’ Critical Realism
The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties
and the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves
the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint
and delineated the crying characterization of bourgeois reality. As
a representative of critical realism, Charles Dickens was the greatest
English realist of the time. With a striking force and truth fullness,
he creates pictures of bourgeois civilization, describing the misery
and sufferings of common people.
The greatness of Charles Dickens lies not only in their satirical
portrayal of bourgeois and in the exposure of the greed and hypocrisy
of the ruling classes, but also in their profound humanism that is revealed
in their sympathy for the laboring people. He creates positive characters
that are quite alien to vices, the rich and who are chiefly common people.
The little David, the family of Peggotty and Micawber are vivid characters
and representatives of the laboring class.
Analysis of “ Oliwer Twist”
The novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the 19th-century London. The author’s intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order and of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens’ first child hero and Fagin the first grotesque figure.
Dickens’s story revolves around young Oliver Twist, an orphan brought up at a “charitable” institution “where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders against the poor-laws rolled about on the floor all day, without the inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing.” After nine years Oliver graduates to a workhouse for young orphans. There his starving fellow sufferers elect him to ask for more food, in punishment for which Oliver is sold to an undertaker. Eventually Oliver runs away, making his painful way to London. Penniless and hungry, Oliver is befriended by a young thief, the Artful Dodger, who introduces him to Fagin and his gang, the evil Bill Sikes, and Sikes’s lover, Nancy. Steadfastly resisting the criminals’ attempts to corrupt him, Oliver eventually escapes, discovers his true parentage, and receives the respect he deserves. Dickens does a creditable job of making Oliver’s unshakable goodness believable. Despite the book’s title, however, Oliver has less to do with the story’s action than do most protagonists. Other characters act toward him or around him more than he acts on his own; his essentially passive role in the novel makes him less interesting than some of the other, more fully drawn characters.
The villains of Oliver Twist are the novel’s most memorable characters. Bill Sikes is stupid, strong, insensitive, and thoroughly evil. With no respect for human life, he insults, threatens, or beats every living thing that gets in his way. Fagin, the clever and devious master of the young thieves, shrewdly manipulates Sikes to his own advantage. Although he apparently retains some shreds of kindness and humanity, Fagin appears primarily as a grotesque, though at times humorous, devil figure. Fagin specializes in corrupting the young. Another evil character, Monks, works behind the scenes for most of the book but exerts an influence.
The truly good characters in the novel are Dickens’s least satisfying. Rose Maylie represents Dickens’s early version of the ideal Victorian woman. She is sweet, unselfish, giving, loving, submissive, completely good-and unbelievable. Harry Maylie’s condescending sacrifice for Rose seems unnecessary at best. Mr. Brownlow fares better; he champions Oliver’s cause, leads the fight against Oliver’s enemies, and has enough personal foibles to make him believable.
Nancy, a prostitute, combines good and bad traits. She lives with Bill Sikes and has stolen for Fagin since her childhood, but she has many admirable qualities. She becomes Oliver’s advocate and defender while Fagin holds him prisoner, and she even betrays her friends to protect him. Dickens ultimately judges Nancy’s sins to be an indictment against Fagin and others who shaped her during her youth. Dickens writes in the book’s preface that Nancy’s character “involves the best and worst shades of our nature; much of its ugliest hues, and something of its most beautiful; it is a contradiction, an anomaly, an apparent impossibility; but it is a truth.” By the end of the book, Nancy receives earthly punishment but heavenly reward.
Dickens’s thematic concern with the nature of good and evil-and the factors that make a person choose one or the other-pervades the novel. Rose Maylie has little temptation to be bad, while Nancy has little opportunity to be good. Oliver is rescued before hunger and desperation force him to compromise his values, and Charley Bates manages to overcome his unfortunate upbringing, although not without great struggle. Others, however, seem doomed from the beginning. Dickens writes that such men as Bill Sikes “would not give the faintest indication of a better nature. Whether every gentler human feeling is dead within such bosoms, or the proper chord to strike has rusted and is hard to find, I do not pretend to know; but that the fact is as I state it, I am sure.” Dickens wrote Oliver Twist to identify social problems such as the workhouse system, the ineffective legal establishment, and the suffering caused by poverty. But, as always, Dickens’s deepest concern is with individuals. He champions self-sacrifice, benevolence, and charity, and he suggests that personal happiness and social progress can occur only as individuals develop these traits. Oliver Twist is Dickens’s second novel, written when he was still in his middle 20s, and does not display the brilliance of character, thought, form, and language that characterizes his most mature work. Nevertheless, the novel has much to recommend it. Dickens’s realistic descriptions of the London criminal underworld are fascinating and effective. He creates lively characters and situations and has a knack for finding just the right word to devastate a character, drive home a point, or create effective irony or humor. His social criticism still generates animated discussions about similar problems existing today, and the moral issues Dickens raises will probably always face us. Some readers object to Dickens’s use of coincidences to propel the plot of Oliver Twist. He depends on the kinds of unlikely connections that many modern writers carefully avoid; Dickens himself toned down his reliance on coincidence as a plot device in his later works. It is important to note that coincidences even more startling than those in Dickens’s books occurred regularly in other novels of the time, and hence, the Victorian reading public was accustomed to suspending its disbelief to a certain extent when reading novels. Dickens and other Victorian writers sought artistic balance in their plots, and making everything fit together was a time-honored goal of the novelist. More important, Dickens hoped to show that, although those who live comfortably may try to deny any connection with-and therefore responsibility for-the poor, all people are naturally and inescapably interconnected. In later novels such as Bleak House, Dickens succeeds in expressing this theme without resorting to coincidence as often as he does in Oliver Twist.
Initial Situation
Oliver is brought up at the workhouse, and then sent to Sowerberry’s to be apprenticed, and finally runs away. Oliver is on his own from the start. No one pities him, and even though he’s supposed to be looked after by the parish authorities, no one takes care of him. He’s sent from one scene of cruelty and oppression to the next, and finally plucks up the courage to stick up for himself (first by asking for more food, then by hitting Noah in the face, and finally by running away). So, by the end of this stage, Oliver is completely on his own in the big bad world.
Conflict
Oliver is arrested as a thief. Oliver doesn’t realize at first that the Dodger and Fagin are thieves – he’s pretty slow. Once he does realize it, he tries to run away. But it’s as though the very fact of consorting with criminals somehow rubbed off on him, or made him look or seem criminal, himself. The question at this stage isn’t so much whether or not Oliver will actually turn criminal, but whether it even matters – if he can be arrested as a thief without having done anything wrong, does it matter whether he’s corrupted, or innocent?
Complication
Oliver is taken in by Mr. Brownlow, but never returns from his errand.Oliver finally has a friend he can trust, but never gets to tell him his story. In part to prove to Mr. Grimwig that Oliver is trustworthy, Mr. Brownlow sends Oliver off on an errand in the city, from which Oliver never returns. Not, of course, because he was trying to rob Mr. Brownlow, but because he was kidnapped by Sikes and Nancy. But Mr. Brownlow doesn’t know that, and Oliver knows he doesn’t know. Will Mr. Brownlow lose faith in Oliver? Again, does it matter whether Oliver actually is a thief or not, if he looks and acts like a thief? Everyone seems to assume he’s a thief.
Climax
The attempted robbery of the Maylies’ house Oliver is forced to participate in the attempted robbery of the Maylies’ house, and has just about made up his mind to risk being shot by Sikes, and go wake up the household to warn them. But he’s trapped between Sikes and his gun on one side, and Giles and his gun on the other. Again – he’s in a position in which everyone assumes he’s a thief because he’s been hanging out with thieves. What’s a poor orphan to do?
Suspense
Oliver’s been the victim of a giant conspiracy from the beginning! After the Maylies have taken Oliver in and he’s been reunited with Mr. Brownlow, Nancy tells Rose what she overheard between Fagin and Monks. Oliver’s been the victim of a conspiracy, and Monks is behind it all. But they’re not really sure what to do about it.
Denouement
Nancy’s information enables Mr. Brownlow and the Maylie group to force a confession from Monks After Nancy overhears the second conversation between Monks and Fagin, she reports back to Mr. Brownlow and Rose. She gives them enough information to be able to find Monks, and bully a confession out of him. The result is a couple of chapters in which Mr. Brownlow forces Monks to tell all. And what Monks doesn’t know, Mr. Brownlow does, so he is able to throw in the necessary bits.
Conclusion
Everyone is married, adopted, transported, or hanged.All the loose ends get tied off, and we do mean all: Nancy gets murdered by Sikes, and Sikes accidentally hangs himself, saving the executioner the trouble. Monks’s confession enables Oliver to inherit a bit of his father’s estate. Knowing that Oliver is the son of his dead best friend, Mr. Brownlow decides to adopt him (although he probably would have adopted him anyway). Rose gets to marry Harry Maylie. Fagin is arrested and hanged, and the rest of his gang is arrested and transported.
Charles Dickens`s contribution to the English literature
Dickens's novels combine brutality with fairy-tale fantasy; sharp, realistic, concrete detail with romance, farce, and melodrama.; the ordinary with the strange. They range through the comic, tender, dramatic, sentimental, grotesque, melodramatic, horrible, eccentric, mysterious, violent, romantic, and morally earnest. Though Dickens was aware of what his readers wanted and was determined to make as much money as he could with his writing, he believed novels had a moral purpose–to arouse innate moral sentiments and to encourage virtuous behavior in readers. It was his moral purpose that led the London Times to call Dickens "the greatest instructor of the Nineteenth Century" in his obituary.During his lifetime, Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in Europe and America. When he visited America to give a series of lectures, his admirers followed him, waited outside his hotel, peered in windows at him, and harassed him in railway cars. In their enthusiasm, Dickens's admirers behaved very much like the fans of a superstar today.Success came early to Dickens; he was twenty-five when his first novel, Pickwick Papers, appeared and made him one of the foremost writers of his day. It is an exuberantly comic novel with almost no shadows, and readers expected all of his novels to follow this pattern. His next two novels, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickelby, fit readers' expectations well enough, and they overlooked the social problems he exposed. As he aged, Dickens's view of his society and human nature grew increasingly somber, a fact which disturbed many readers and critics. A Tale of Two Citieswas attacked for having little, if any humor.Always concerned to make money with his writings, Dickens took seriously the negative response many readers had to his darker novels. He deliberately addressed their discontent when he wrote Great Expectations, which he affirmed was written "in a most singular and comic manner." In a letter to a friend, he explained:You will not have to complain of the want of humour as in The Tale of Two Cities. I have made the opening, I hope, in its general effect exceedingly droll. I have put a child and a good-natured foolish man, in relations that seem to me very funny. Of course I have got in the pivot on which the story will turn too–and which indeed, as you will remember, was the grotesque tragi-comic conception that first encouraged me. To be quite sure that I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe.After his death, his literary reputation waned and his novels tended not to be taken seriously. The novelist George Meredith found them intellectually lacking:
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