Чарльз Дикенсон

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CHARLES DIKENS

(1812-1870)  

      Charles Dickens is one of the best English writers. Dickens came from a petty bourgeois family. The great delight of Dickens^,  early boyhood was the reading of a little library which he discovered in an upstairs room of his father^’s house in Portsmouth. His father was a clerk, he could never make both ends meet and was thrown into the debtors^, prison. In those days a man who was imprisoned for debt could have his family to live with him in the prison, where a fair amount of liberty was allowed. And so Dickens^, mother, with her other children, went to stay at the prison. Little Charles was sent to work. He stuck labels on blacking-bottles. When his father got a legacy and was set free, the boy was able to leave his dirty work of label-pasting and was sent to school.

      Soon he entered a lawyer^’s office. He learned shorthand and by spending much of his time at the British Museum managed to make up for the shortcomings in his education.

      Dickens was nineteen years old when he became a reporter. While he was working for his newspaper he began writing sketches of the characters he had observed; and in the year 1836 they were collected into a book under the title of “Sketches by Boz.” In 1837 “The Pickwick Papers” was published. The book brought him fame and money. He worked without rest and produced many novels.

      All his writings, whether sad or happy, serious or gay, are alive with warm-hearted sympathy for poor people and their sufferings. In “Little Dorrit” he attacks debtors^, prisons. In “Hard Times” he describes the most terribly hard conditions under which not only grown-ups but also little children were working in mines and cotton-mills. In “Oliver Twist” he draws attention to the misery of life in the slums of London.

      Yet Dickens was but a petty bourgeois writer, who could not overstep the limits of his class. This is evident in his negative attitude towards the revolutionary activities of the Chartists. His petty bourgeois sentimentality found expression in the happy endings of almost all his novels. Taken as a whole, Dickens^’s novels offer a complete realistic picture of the English bourgeois society of the midnineteenth century and are highly valued for their realism and humanity.  
 Dickens died in 1870 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, as he wished with nothing on the stone but his name “Charles Dickens”.  
 

1. When was Charles Dickens born?
2. Why was Dickens^’ father put into prison?
3. Where did Charles Dickens work when he was a boy?
4. What novels written by Dickens have you read?
5. Name some characters from Dickens^’ books.