LIFE AND WORKS

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His father was a surgeon and his mother literary woman. He
studied classics in Oxford, and distinguished himself for his eccentricity. He became a disciple of Walter
Pater, accepting the theory of “Art for Art’s Sake”. After graduating, he established in London and became
famous for his "dandy" way of life. In 1881 he edited poems and started a very successful tour through
America. On coming back to Europe in 1883, he married Constance Lloydand had two children. In the late
1880s Wilde revealed his literary talent with a series of short stories and the novel The Picture of Dorian
Gray. His masterpiece is the play The Importance of Being Earnest. In 1891 he met a young beautiful man
Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) and they had homosexual affair. After the denounce of the father of Bosie,
Wilde was sentenced to two-years of hard labour, during which he wrote De Profundis, a long letter for
Bosie. When he was released he was a broken man: his wife refused to see him and he went in exile in
France where he lived in poverty until his death for meningitis in 1900.

THE THOUGHT
Wilde adopted "the aesthetic ideal" and lived the double role of rebel and dandy. The dandy must be
distinguished from the bohemian: while the bohemian allies himself to the rural or urban proletariat, the
dandy is a bourgeois artist and remains a member of his class. The Wildean dandy is an aristocrat whose
elegance is a symbol of the superiority of his spirit. He is an individualist who demands absolute freedom.
He rejected the didacticism of the early Victorian novel and his interest in beauty had no moral attitude.
For him doesn't exist a moral or an immoral book, but only well or badly written books. The concept of "Art
for Art’s Sake" was to him a moral imperative (not only an aesthetic one). He believed that only "Art as the
cult of Beauty" could prevent the murder of the soul (art is eternal: Keats). Wilde perceived the artist as an
alien in a materialistic world. He wrote only to please himself and was not interested in communicating to
his theories to mankid. His pursuit of beauty is the tragic act of a superior being inevitably turned into an
outcast.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

The painter Basil Hallward paints a portrait of the beautiful Dorian Gary. This one desires the eternal
beauty, so the signs of age, experience and vice appear on the portrait. When the painter sees the
corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Then he stabs the portrait but he mysteriously kills
himself. At the end the picture returns to its original purity. The narrator is unobtrusive third-person. There
is an identification between the reader and the character. The setting are vividly described. The characters
reveal themselves through what they say or what other people say of them (technique of drama). The story
is a version of the myth of Faust, a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be
satisifed. This soul becomes the picture. For Wilde beautiful people are moral people and the ugly people
are immoral people (Renaissance idea). The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and
reality cannot be escaped. The corrupting picture is a symbol of the immorality of the Victorian middle
class, while Dorian's innocent appearence is symbol of bourgeois hypocrisy. The picture restored to its
original beauty symbolizes Wilde's theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal (Keats).

Basil Hallward [The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter 1]

The text is narrated in the third person and the narrator is unobtrusive. In the first part there is the
description of the painter's studio: the atmosphere is decadent and sensuous. There is a connection
between the inside and the outside through the open door. There are elements of the senses of smelling
and hearing: the delicate smell of the flowers and the dim roar of London. We meet Lord Henry Watton,
the painter's friend, that is smoking opium. In the second part we meet the painter, Basil Hallward, who
admires the portrait of a man he has painted (Dorian Gray): he is very pleased. There are references to
Walter Pater's theory about art. In the third part there is a dialogue between the two characters. We learn
that Basil is more serious than Watton: the last one is languid and cynical. Basil doesn't want to send the
portrait, so that Watton says that painters are odd people. He says that there is only one thing worse than
being talked about, and that is not being talked about (Wilde's theory). We learn that Dorian Gray is a
beautiful young man, but not very intelligent: beauty isn't everything and it ends where an intellectual
expression begins

LIFE AND WORKS

He was born in Portsmouth in 1812. Ha had an unhappy childhood, since his father went to prison for debt
and he had to work in a factory at the age of twelve. These days of suffering influenced much of the
content of his novels. He became a journalist at the Parliament and Law Courts and published under the
pen name "Boz" some collection of articles describing London people and scenes which demonstrated his
humor and satire. Dickens's success continued with the novels in which he exposed the esploited lives of
children in the slums and factories (Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit) and the conditions of
the poor and the working class (Hard Times, Blank House and Great Expectations). He was also the busy
editor of magazines, "Household Words" and later "All The Year Round". He died in 1870 and was buried in
Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

THE THOUGHT
Dickens was first and foremost a storyteller. His plots are well-planned even if a times they sound a bit
artificial and episodic (probably due to the publication in instalments). The sitting was London, described in
realistic details. At first Dickens created middle class characters, often satirised. Then he became critical of
society and aware of the spiritual and material corruption due to the industrialism, juxtaposing terrible
descriptions of London misery and crime with amusing sketches of the town. Dickens created caricatures of
the middle, lower and lowest classes and ridiculed their peculiar social characteristics. He was always on
the side of the poor and the outcast. Children are often the most important characters in Dickens's novels.
He made them the moral teachers instead of the taught. His work had a didactic aim: he wanted the
wealthier English classes to know and to alleviate the sufferings of poor classes and if children above all. For
these purposes he used an effective language to describe the London life and characters. He carefully chose
adjectives, repetitios of words and structures; he justaposed images and ideas, hyperbolic and ironic
remarks.

HARD TIMES
This novel is set in an imaginary industrial town named Coketown where lives Thomas Gradgrind, an
educator who believes in facts and statistics and who founded the school of town where his theories are
thought. He marries his daughter to a rich banker, Josia Bounderby. We can divided this novel into three
books:
1) Sowing, show us the seeds planted by Gradgrind and Bunderby education;
2) Reaping, reveals the results of these seeds;
3) Garnering, gives the details. Hard Times focuses on the difference between the rich and poor or factory
owners and workers who were forced to work long hours for low pay in dirty and dangerous factories. This
novel also denounces criticizes the materialism and narrow-mindedness of Utilitarianism and suggest that
19th century in England was turning human beings into machines without emotions and imaginations.
Dicken's primary aim is to citicize the society by illustrating the dangers of allowing humans to become like
machines and suggesting that without compassion and immagination life would be intolerable.

Coketown [Hard Times, Book 1, Chapter 5]

In this extract there is the description of the industrial centre of Coketown: it is a triumph of fact. There are
three similes:
1) the red brick soiled by the black smoke are like the painted face of a savage;
2) the smoke coming out of the chimneys is like snakes;
3) the movement of the steam-engine is like that of the head of an elephants. The colours are very
important. For the inhabitants every day are the same: they produce goods assigned to the rich classes
(that are hypocritical, because despise the town and the people who made that goods for them). All the
public buildings are equal and monotonous: jail, infirmary, town-hall and churches (it means that there isn’t
difference between material and spiritual aspect). The school has a strange name, «M’Choakumchild»,
which sound like “choke (suffocate) the child”: the school fills the children with facts. Everything in the
town is filtered through the figures. The other residents of the town wanted the workers to go to church
and to stop getting drunk and taking opium. Mr Grandgrind’s and his friend Mr Bounderby’s tabular
statements proved that these people had good lives and were ungrateful. It wasn’t true: they only
considered other people dregs. There Dickens critics the utilitarianism.