Charles Dickens: biografia e Oliver Twist

Biografia breve in inglese di Charles Dickens e riassunto della sua opera Oliver Twist (2 pagine formato doc)

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CHARLES DICKENS: BIOGRAFIA

Charles Dickens. Life - Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth (England), in 1812.

He had an unhappy childhood because when his father was imprisoned for debts Charles was compelled to work in a factory.
This sad experience marked his life and his future as novelist.
Thanks to an economic improvement, Dickens continued his studies and became a journalist at the Parliament and Law Courts.
He started his career as novelist by publishing some works in instalments as for example Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers where he showed to readers his humour.
His interest, as we can notice in his most important social novels, was for the humble, poor people, and their difficult life conditions.
Dickens was also the editor of some magazines which published
the writings of many novelists.
He spent the last years of his life travelling
and giving theatrical readings of his own work.
He died in 1870 and was buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Oliver Twist e Charles Dickens: riassunto in inglese

CHARLES DICKENS: OPERE

Works
Influences: - Bible
- Fairy tales
- Nursery rhymes
- 18th-century novelists
- Gothic novels
Plots well-planned, but they may sound a bit artificial and episodic
the publication in instalments discouraged unified plotting and create pressure on Dickens to conform to the public taste
London: main setting of Dickens’s novels, he knew the city and described it in realistic details.
In his mature works, the author draws popular attention to public wrongs by juxtaposing terrible descriptions of London misery with amusing sketches of the town.

Charles Dickens e Oliver Twist: riassunto

CHARLES DICKENS: BIOGRAFIA BREVE IN INGLESE

Characters caricatures: he exaggerated and ridiculed the peculiar characteristics of the different classes using their own dialogues. He was always on the side of the poor and the outcast and erased the social frontiers of the novel.
Children are often the principal characters in Dickens’s novels: by giving instances of good children and worthless adults he reverses the natural order of things by making children the moral teachers and the model to follow.

DIDACTIC AIM
Every Dickens’s work highlights the troubled condition of the working class but he didn’t try to give any solutions to these problems, his task was just to get the common intelligence of the country to alleviate sufferings. Thanks to Dickens’s social novels, the wealthier classes acquired knowledge of their poorer neighbours
Although he was not a revolutionary thinker, Dickens was aware of the corruption under the impact of industrialism and he became more and more critical about society.

Oliver Twist: riassunto in inglese

OLIVER TWIST: RIASSUNTO

Oliver Twist (1837). This novel portrays true economic problems and humiliations Dickens suffered during his childhood.
Plot - The main character, Oliver Twist, is a poor orphan which is brought up in a workhouse and later sold to an undertaker, but he run away to London to escape from his cruelty. In the city he is kidnapped by a nasty gang of young pickpockets and forced to commit burglaries, but eventually he finds a middle-class family that adopts him and treats him well. After some investigations, they discover that Oliver has noble origins and in the end all the evil characters are arrested.
Setting London – depicted at three different social levels
I – Parochial world: Workhouse
The inhabitants of this world are insensible to the feelings of the poor and only think about their personal profit.
II- Criminal world : pickpockets and murderers
Poverty brings them to crime and the only weapon they have is violence. The live in dirty slums, they’re constantly scared and they always die in a miserable way.
III – World of the Victorian middle class: middle-class family
Respectable people who believe in moral values and in the principles of human dignity.
Oliver Twist is a novel of social denunciation: it shows how workhouses did not provide any means for social or economic improvement and it points out that officials who ran workhouses often abused worker’s rights as individuals and caused them further misery.