Transcript Because……

Why do we still
read
Dickens?
Because……
…he is an ICON in the English-speaking world
it is impossible to ignore him!
Because…
of his ability to mix
imagination and realism
of his mastery in
describing
a pantheon of
rich characters
of his witty
plots
of his skill to keep
tragedy and laughter
together…
…Good and Evil…
…hope and despair...
To read Dickens you have to
forget yourself and enter his own door
and meet his world…
… made up of fairy tales…
…where bad people are bad as if they
were in children’s tales.
In Dickens’s world everything is
real and unreal,
just like a dream
that’s why nowadays in Italy
Dickens is relegated to children
Dickens understood the great contradictions
of his age and…
…exploited them by inventing
the modern social novel
Dickens: inventor of the modern social novel
PICARESQUE TRADITION
SENTIMENTAL
TRADITION
SOCIAL NOVEL
romantic taste
for melodrama
journalistic passion
for reporting
Dickens succeeded in doing that thanks to:
(a) his romantic taste of melodrama
=> his childhood’s readings
(b) His journalistic passion for reports
=> his past experience as a journalist
He never analyses the causes of
the evils he deals with
he simply
presents
the results of
them
however he catches the deepest aspects of
the affluent and prudish Victorian society
with irony and parody
so his Victorian characters are famous
all over the English-speaking countries
he is a great creator of characters
an artist of comic and grotesque
creative skill and of the sentimental
middle class melodrama
he remains an eternal optimist
In the English-speaking countries Dickens is
an institution,
just like Manzoni in Italy
His books are in any house
An icon which still inspires TV
and radio programmes , movies
His stories remind us of the light and the shadow
filtering the spectrum of human experience
A “campaigning” novelist
who attacks:
- the institution of the
workhouses and the
faults of the legal system
(Oliver Twist)
-the system of
private boarding schools
(David Copperfield ,
Nicholas Nickleby)
-the appalling living conditions
in slums and the
corruption in government
(Bleak House)
-the whole industrial system
and the pious, hypocritical
midde class mentality
of useful actions
(Hard Times)
Negative aspects:
(a) a moralist, not a social reformer
(b) lacks the sublety of great writers
(e.g. Jane Austen)
(c) his “black and white worlds”, quite a
medieval morality following absolute values
(d) his women = either perfect or lost sinners (whose
redemption is only death). He did believe that,
or maybe he knew his public would have accepted
only that moral
Dickens’s most famous negative characters
Uriah Heep,
from David Copperfield
whose name was taken by
the English rock band
“Uriah Heep” in 1970s
Gradgrind , from Hard Times
Fagin, from Oliver Twist
Miss Havisham,
from Great Expectations
but, above all, Ebenezer Scrooge
from A Christmas Carol
who inspired Disney’s
Scrooge McDuck
Tomorrow Dickens would have been 200 years old
(7th February 1812)
and we too wanted to
join the world’s choir of
Happy birthday,
Mr Dickens