Dickens, Charles John Huffam (1812-1870)

VICTORIAN CHILDREN AND VICTORIAN ECCENTRICS

(1836 – 1876)

12.1. Викторианство как феномен европейской культуры. Становление критического реализма. Чарльз Диккенс: жизнь и творчество. Эволюция творчества Диккенса: становление жанра социальной эпопеи, полифоничность поздней манеры.

Britain had emerged from the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world's predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English that “The modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day.”

This new status as the world's first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy.

The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to faith. In politics a widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles Swinburne's poetry or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.

Despite this persistence critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of Jane Austen in 1817 and Sir Walter Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the age of the novel.

English novelist and one of the most popular writers in the history of literature. In his enormous body of works, Dickens combined masterly storytelling, humor, pathos, and irony with sharp social criticism and acute observation of people and places, both real and imagined.

Dickens was born in Portsmouth and spent most of his childhood in London and Kent, both of which appear frequently in his novels. He started school at the age of nine, but his education was interrupted when his father, an amiable but careless minor civil servant, was imprisoned for debt. The boy was then forced to support himself by working in a shoe-polish factory. A resulting sense of humiliation and abandonment haunted him for life, and he later described this experience, only slightly altered, in his novel David Copperfield (1849-1850). For the most part, he was self-educated. Among his favorite books were those by such great 18th-century novelists as Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, and their influence can be discerned in Dickens's own novels.

Dickens took a job as a legal clerk. After learning shorthand, he began working as a reporter in the courts and Parliament, perhaps developing the power of precise description that was to make his creative writing so remarkable.

In 1833 Dickens published the first of a series of original descriptive sketches of daily life in London, using the pseudonym Boz. A London publisher commissioned a volume of similar sketches to accompany illustrations by a celebrated artist. The success of this work, Sketches by Boz (1836), permitted Dickens to marry and led to the proposal of a similar publishing venture. Dickens transformed this particular project from a set of loosely connected vignettes into a comic narrative, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). The success of this first novel made Dickens famous. At the same time it influenced the publishing industry in Great Britain, being issued in a rather unusual form, that of inexpensive monthly installments; this method of publication quickly became popular among Dickens's contemporaries.

Dickens subsequently maintained his fame with a constant stream of novels. A man of enormous energy and wide talents, he also engaged in many other activities. He edited weekly periodicals, administered charitable organizations, and pressed for many social reforms. He lectured in the United States in favor of an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery. Dickens's extra-literary activities also included managing a theatrical company that played before Queen Victoria and giving public readings of his own works in England and America. All these successes, however, were shadowed by domestic unhappiness. Incompatibility and Dickens's relations with a young actress, Ellen Ternan, led to his separation from his wife, after the marriage had produced ten children. He suffered a fatal stroke on June 9, 1870, and was buried in Westminster Abbey five days later.

As Dickens matured artistically, his novels developed from comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby, to works of great social relevance, psychological insight, and narrative and symbolic complexity. Among his fine works are Bleak House, Little Dorritt, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend. Readers of the 19th and early 20th century usually prized Dickens's earlier novels for their humor and pathos. Critics today tend to rank more highly the later works because of their formal coherence and acute perception of the human condition. Dickens's major writings include Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, and A Tale of Two Cities.

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn, (1810-1865).

English novelist, known for her thorough research, compassion toward her subjects, and skillful narrative style. She was born Elizabeth Stevenson in London. Her first novel was Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life (pub. anonymously in 1848), an attack on the behavior of factory employers during the 1840s, a time of depression and hardship for the British working class. The book won her the friendship of Charles Dickens, who requested a contribution to his new magazine, Household Words. Between 1851 and 1853 Gaskell contributed the papers later published under the title of Cranford (1853). This book, concerning elegant gentility among women in a country town, has become an English classic.

12.2. Творчество Уильяма Теккерея. Ранняя проза: снобизм и лицедейство. «Ярмарка тщеславия». Ироническое обыгрывание условностей викторианского романа. Рефлексивность и интеллектуализм, ироничность прозы.

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