Assignment p-6 Charles dickens as a socialist

                                                               

        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 7^th february1812.

Ø  He was died at the age of 58 on 9^th 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)