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:                                                       Shukuruva Z.Sh.

Student:                                                           Moskvichyova K.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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                                                 7-11

1.3 Middle  years                                              11-12

1.4 Last years                                                   12-13

1.5 Death                                                       13

Literary  style of  Charles Dickens

2.1 Characters                                                   14-15

2.2 Literary techniques                                      15-16

2.3 Dickens’ Critical Realism                            16

Analysis of “Oliwer  Twist”                                    17-20

Dickens`s contribution  to the  English literature 21-    23

Conclusion                                                                 24

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 18^th-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 198^th 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-care-of boy". He spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, especially the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He spoke, later in life, of his poignant memories of childhood, and of his near photographic memory of the people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief period as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded Charles a few years' private education at William Giles's School, in Chatham.

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.