英美文学Lecture8,Dickens.ppt

Charles Dickens; Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth, England in 1812. As the second of eight children in a very poor family, he lived a difficult childhood. Eventually, his father was sent to debtor’s prison, and Dickens himself went to work at the age of twelve to help pay off the family’s debt. ; This troublesome time scarred Dickens deeply and left an ineradicable impression on his mind. Besides, this first-hand taste of misery provided him with substantial material for such stories as Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, and David Copperfield, in which filthy working conditions appeat repeatedly. ;A Time of Change; English cities swelled as a growing and impoverished working class flocked to them in search of work. As this influx of workers into urban centers continued, the bourgeoisie took advantage of the surplus of labor by keeping wages low. The poor thus remained poor, and often lived cramped in sordid squalor. ; In many of his novels, Dickens chronicles his protagonists’ attempts to fight their way out of such poverty and despair. ; Steeped in social criticism, Dickens’s writing provides a keen, sympathetic chronicle of the plight of the urban poor in nineteenth-century England. During his lifetime, Dickens enjoyed immense popularity, in part because of his vivid characterizations, and in part because he published his novels in installments, making them readily affordable to a greater number of people. ;one the greatest critical realist;a large-scale criticism; childern as central figures Oliver Twist The Old Curiostiy Shop David Copperfield Great Expectations ;a master of humor and pathos;strength and weakness;;Oliver Twist; Throughout the novel, Dickens uses Oliver’s character to challenge the Victorian idea that paupers and criminals are already evil at birth, arguing instead that a corrupt environment is the source of vice. Oliver is shocked and horrified when he sees