CHARLES DICKENS

- Victorians lived in a very precise and structured society. Their system also had
very negative consequences such as the concentration of people in towns,
unhealthy houses with insufficient water supplies and sanitation.
- The class that benefited from the new situation was the middle class of
manufacturers, merchants, bankers while many poor families lived in total
squalor.
- Respectability and formality became key values and this age was undoubtedly
excessively puritanical.
- Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 where he went to school and
started reading novels by Fielding and Defoe.
- In 1823 his family moved to London where his father worked and they lived in
dingy (squallidi) suburbs.
- His father was imprisoned for debts and he had to work labelling (etichettare)
bottles in a factory (these painful experiences came out in David Copperfield)
- After two years the family fortunes improved thanks to a legacy and he was sent
back to a school for boys of lower middle class.
- At 15 he left school and worked as a clerk in a lawyers’ office.
- He learnt shorthand (stenografia) there and became a reporter and journalist in
1830.
- He got married in 1836 with Catherine Hogarth and he divorced in 1856.
- He had fallen in love with an 18 years old actress Ellen Ternan but this
relationship was a source of doubt and regret for a Victorian.
- He visited US in 1842 and in 1867 and gave public readings of his novels which
were a great success.
- He died in 1870, buried in Westminster.
- Children are the most important characters of his novels and their virtues are
often opposed to the flaws of grown-up people. Children often represent the
moral teachers in his stories.
- He set most of his stories in London or industrial cities and described life
conditions very carefully.
- Dickens had a DIDACTIC AIM which consisted in pointing out the evils and
public abuses and describe the spiritual and material corruption of the society
under the impact of industrialism.
- Did he really criticize the principles of the society he lived in? Yes, he did but if
you consider the end of his novels which is always positive and happy, he didn’t
take his criticism to its extreme consequences. In the end his characters manage
to adjust to Victorian society, they find a way to live in it.
- Dickens never advocated a radical change in the structure of society or made
constructive suggestions except for a general attitude of compassion of heart
and benevolence that is the main message at the end of his novels.
- He was a great storyteller and invented fascinating and complex plots.