CHARLES DICKENS
He was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood. He had 8 siblings but only 6
survived. The father spent beyond his means. The family went to London in 1822 and his father was
imprisoned for debts and at the time all the family went to prison. So Charles couldn’t go to school. At
the age of 12 he was forced to work in a shoe polish factory for 11 hours a day. This explains the
reason why he represented children exploited in factories. When the family’s financial position
improved he went to school. After school he had an ambition desire to became rich and in 1827 worked
in a solicitor office. He began to write down the features of the people he watched to in fact he was a
great observer. In 1831 began his journalistic career working by day and night. Became a newspaper
reporter with the pen name Boz. In 1835 he published his first novel. In the same year he married
Catherine but they didn’t have a happy marriage. With his fame, rumors began to spread about his
drunkness and an admission to an asylum. Their family set sail for America and here Charles was
interested in the unusual. In 1844 he went to Italy. He began to write in a radical newspaper . He was
interested also in dramas and met a young actress. He fell in love with her and so his marriage
collapsed. In 1865 there was an accident(crash train) when he was in a train with this young actress
returning from Paris. He wanted to retrieve the final part of his book “Our Mutual friend”. His health
began to fail. In 1870 he suffered a stroke and died. He was buried at Westmister Abbey.
THE SETTING OF DICKENS’S NOVELS
Dickens was the great novelist of cities in particular of London. London is depicted in three different
social levels: the parochial world of the workhousesits inhabitants belong to the lower middle class.
The criminal worldmurderers, pickpockets living in squalid slums. The Victorian middle
classrespectable people believing in human dignity. He offered a detailed description of “Seven Dials”
that was a famous slum district. Dickens talked about its sense of disorientation and confinement
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 in fact he exaggerated and ridiculed peculiar social characteristics of
the middle, lower and lowest classes and also weak female characters. He was on the side of the poor,
the outcast and the working class.
DICKENS’S THEMES
In his most important works he talks about family, childhood and poverty. These are subjects to which
he returned time and again. This because he had a difficult childhood working in a factory. In Dickens,
children are innocent creatures or creatures corrupted by adults but he thinks that children can teach
adults more than adults can teach children. Most of these children begin in negative circumstances(i.e
they are exploited in workhouse) but the story always rises to a happy ending (pure people won ,bad
people lost) which resolve the contradictions in their life created by adults. Adult world is not depicted
in a positive way.
DICKENS’S AIM
With his works Dickens wanted to entertain people but also to inform them of the evils created by
industrial society. He wanted to urge/prompt people to do something. So he was a social campaigning
novelist and wanted to deal with very specific themes of which the Victoria society was interested in.
His books highlight all the great Victorian controversies: the errors of the legal system, the horrors of
factory employment, scandals in private schools, the miseries of prostitution, corruption in government.
DICKENS’S STYLE
Dickens is accurate in descriptions with a style rich and original. It is characterized by long lists of
