ASSIGNMENT
NAME: Maheta Arati R.
Class: M.A.
Semester: 2
Roll No.:3
Paper: 6 (The Victorian Literature
Topic: Charles Dickens as a Socialist
Submitted to: Department Of English.
(MKBU)
Guided by: M’em Heenaba Zala
Year: 2014-15
Batch: 2013-15
Words: 1,130
About Charles Dickens
Ø He was born on 7th february1812.
Ø He was died at the age of 58 on 9th
June 1870
Ø He was known as a socialist and he represent
reality of society in his novel.
Ø Charles dickens is sent to Blacking Factory at
age of twelve and he was worked for 12 hours day in atrocious conditions.
Ø This experience leaves him mentally scared
Ø As a social reformer Charles Dickens takes a
great interest in social reformation.
Ø He refers to Business men as ‘SCHEMER’ and
‘WILLIANS’ and developed hospitality towards political economics.
Ø He becomes a successful novelist.
Ø His experience and secret from blacking factory
gives him Inspiration to write ‘Great Expectation’ and ‘David Copperfield’.
Ø His writing continually reflects his social and
political views and his distaste for business men.
Ø Charles Dickens writes his character of the lower
social class to have more values than aristocratic that in his own view he has
grown to despise.
Ø The presents rise up in revolt against the cruel
inhumane treatment of the poor and they storm the Bastille Killing the
aristocrats which begins the French Revolution.
Some important Work of
Charles Dickens
Ø
Dickens's novels were, among other things,
works of social commentary. He was a fierce
critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society.
Ø In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows
quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen".
Ø Dickens's second novel, Oliver
Twist (1839), shocked readers
with its images of poverty and crime: it destroyed middle class polemics about
criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty
entailed.
Ø In Dickens’s most of the work there was he
represent ‘domestication of women’.
Ø He present his female character as a ‘’Angel in
the house.
Ø He tells abut it like;
Ø She was immensely charming.
Ø She was utterly unselfish.
Ø She excelled in the difficult arts of family
life.
Ø She sacrifices herself daily.
Ø If there was chicken, she took the leg, if there
was a draught she sat in it-in short she was so constituted that she never had
a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds
and wishes of others.
(Above all – I need not say it She was pure)-Woolf
·
Victimization of women Characters
in the novel.
Ø Example –Oliver’s Mother and
Nancy in his novel Oliver Twist.
Ø John Bailey points out that:
Nancy’s living is the living of England, a nightmare society in which drudgery
is endless and stupefying.
Ø In which the natural affections
are warped and the identity of man appears only in resolution and violence.
Ø It is a more disquieting picture
than the carefully and methodically symbolized.
Ø Social panoramas of Bleak House,
Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.
Ø The abuse of new poor law
system.
Ø The evils of the criminal world
in London.
Ø The Victorian idea of charity,
the workhouses was a failed attempt to solve the problem of poverty and
unwanted child.
Ø Oliver twist is the
manifestations of Victorian conscience.
vHis
literary style
Ø Dickens loved the
style of the 18th century picaresque novels which he found
in abundance on his father's shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these,
perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the
fables of The Arabian Nights
Ø Dickens' Dream by Robert Williams
busss portraying Dickens at his desk Gads Hill Place surrounded by
many of his characters
Ø His writing style is
marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift
for caricature, is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen
practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of
varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary
popular theatre.
Ø Dickens worked
intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would
reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of
motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical
impetus" to the novels' meanings To cite one of numerous examples, the name
Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions
to "murder" and stony coldness.
Ø His literary style is
also a mixture of fantasy and realism His satires of
British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble
Refrigerator"—are often popular.
Ø Comparing orphans to
stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are
just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy.
Ø The author worked
closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the
outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he
envisioned them.
Ø He would brief the
illustrator on plans for each month's installment so that work could begin
before he wrote them.
Ø Marcus Stone illustrator of Our
Mutual Friend recalled that the author was always "ready to describe
down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ...
life-history of the creations of his fancy."[
vPoems
by Charles Dickens’
vSome important quotations by Charles dickens which represented
him as a socialist.
1) There is a passion for something deeply
implanted in the human breast.
(Oliver
Twist chapter -10)
2) It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was
the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season
of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had
everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to
Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far
like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its
being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison
only.''
(A Tale of Two Cities
chapter-1)
3)
Three meals of thin gruel a day, onion twice a week half roll on Saturday.
(Oliver Twist
chapter-2)
4)
Dignity and even holiness too sometimes, are more question of coat and
waistcoat than some people imagine.
(Oliver Twist chapter -37 p-267)
5)
‘’ It is very remarkable circumstance sir said same Weller in (Pickwick Papers ch-22.)
o And at last I
have conclude my assignment with famous line of Oliver Twist
‘’ Sir I want some More’’
(Oliver
Twist)
