DICKENS’S LIFE
•Born in Portsmouth in 1812.
•Unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory at the age of 12 ( his father went to prison for debts).
•He became a newspaper reporter with the pen name Boz.
•In 1836 Sketches by Boz, articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments.
•Success with autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist(1838), David Copperfield(1849-50), Little Dorrit(1857).
•Bleak House(1853), Hard Times(1854), Great Expectations (1860-61) set against the background pf social issues.
•Busy editor of magazines.
•Died in 1870.
THE SETTING OF DICKENS’S NOVELS
▲Dickens was the great novelist of cities, especially London.
▲London is depicted at three different social levels:
1. The parochial world of the workhouses→ its inhabitants belong to the lower middle class.
2. The criminal world→ murderers, pickpockets living in squalid slums.
3. The Victorian middle → class respectable people in human dignity.
•Detailed description of “Seven Dials”, a notorious slum district→ its sense of disorientation and confinement in
Dickens’s novels.
DICKENS’S CHARACTERS
Dickens shifted the social frontiers of the novel: the 18th century realistic upper middle-class world was replaced by the
one of the lower orders.
He depicted Victorian society in all its variety, its richness and its squalor.
He created:
•Caricatures→ he exaggerated and ridiculed peculiar social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest classes
•Weak female characters
He was on the side of the poor, the outcast, the working-class.
DICKENS’S THEMES
■Family, childhood and poverty → the subjects to which he returned time and again.
■Dickens’s children are either innocent or corrupted by adults.
■Most of these children begin in negative circumstances and rise to happy endings which resolve the contradictions in
their life created by the adult world.
DICKENS’S AIM
Dickens tried to get the common intelligence of the country to alleviate social sufferings.
He was a campaigning novelist and his books highlight all the great Victorian controversies:
•The faults of the legal system (Oliver Twist)
•The horrors of factory employment (David Copperfield, Hard Times)
•Scandals in private school (David Copperfield)
•The miseries of prostitution
•The appalling living conditions in slums (Bleak House)
