DICKENS

Was born at Portsmouth, in Hampshire, in 1812. When he was 5 the family move in Kent, and five years later, they removed in London. Dickens’ education in regular school was interrupted in 1824 when his father was sent to prison for debt and he started to work ten-hours a day in a factory (Warren’s Blacking Warehouse). This traumatic experience will influence all Dickens’ novels. At the age of fourteen he went to work as a clerk in a legal office, and started writing as journalist. Adopting the pen name of “Boz”, he started to publish his first novels, like “Sketches by Boz” and “The Pickwick Papers”, which will give to him a strong success in Britain and in USA. His popularity will increase also in Italy and France, until, in 1870, a stroke will cut short his life.

Dickens was the most important representative novelist of the age. His intellectual position was that of a critic who recounts, through his novels, the condition of contemporary society. Some examples are:

*Oliver Twist deal with the sufferings of a child brought up in a workhouse; *Martin Chuzzlewit, through which he attacks cruelty in boarding schools; *Hard Times deals with the sufferings of the factory system and the utilitarian philosophy.

The novels of the 1840s are more coherently organized around related themes.

- Dombey and Son deals with the exaggerate love of money and disinterested affections (failure of a rich merchant)

- Bleak House includes an attack on the Court of Chancery and deals with the harms that law’s delay can done in the lives of the common people

- Great Expectations regards the theme of growing up but also the pride and snobbery of society.

- David Copperfield, often considered Dickens’ masterpiece, is the greatest portraits of the loves, pains and wonders of childhood, features that represent Dickens’ reality.

About the settings, they are various: we go from the countryside and merry old England [The Pickwick Papers] to the provincial towns and the industrial settlements of the north; but the typical scenery is London, the crowded city where different classes live together, yet not communicating.

Like the settings, also the characters are various: Dickens portrays especially the lower and middle class’ figure, like eccentrics, vagabonds, criminals, orphan, of which he capture every singular feature. About the upper class, there is a description that tend to fall into stereotypes, especially with the elementary division into bad and good.

All these dark colours of the Victorian society, combined with the comic and humoristic taste that Dickens can give to through the dialogues, make his novels unforgettable.