Academic literature on the topic 'Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 Characters Fathers'

The English novelist Charles John Hoffman Dickens (1812-1870) is well known for scholars and students of English literature. His name is always accompanied to some( classics) in the history of the English novel such as: ( Oliver Twist( 1839), David Copperfield (1850), Hard Times ( 1854 ), The Tale of Two Cities ( 1859 )Great Expectations (1860) and other novels. He is one of the most professional novelists of the Victorian age; rather, he is regarded by many critics as the father of the realistic trend and the greatest novelist of his age. In his fiction, Dickens created some of the world's best-known fictional characters that became prototypes not only in English but in world literature as well. Oliver Twist presents a unique depiction of evil and good characters in English society through a highly serious and powerful conflict full of dramatic events like a traditional tragedy, but the line of action turns to satisfaction and happy end just like a work of comedy. This paper claims that the novelist employs the dramatic genre: Tragi-comedy into a novel by mixing elements of both tragedy and comedy. Although the action in the novel is highly tragic and full of miseries and evil plots, the novel ends happily.

Dickens et son oeuvre ont fait l'objet de multiples interpretations. Ceci est du a la complexite de la personnalite de l'ecrivain et a la richesse de son texte. Il y a cependant un sujet relativement peu aborde, celui de l'evolution du romancier comme artiste du grotesque. C'est le but que nous avons fixe a notre travail ; nous nous sommes appuyes sur l'analyse de nombreux personnages des romans. En tenant compte de sa nature ambigue, la premiere partie propose une definition historique et linguistique du terme "grotesque" et une serie d'opinions anciennes et modernes sur la question. Ensuite, nous avons porte attention aux rapports entretenus par dickens avec le theatre populaire et la satire picturale. Sa fidelite a ces traditions grotesques est explicitee dans notre deuxieme partie. Les ouvrages de jeunesse presentent des situations empruntees aux domaines de la pantomime et de la commedia dell'arte. Le caractere excentrique de certains personnages les apparente aux habitants du monde merveilleux d'arlequin et de pantalon, alors que d'autres semblent sortis tout droit des tableaux d'hogarth. Il est notable que, malgre la presence dans l'oeuvre de preoccupations sociales et politiques, cette periode est celle d'une vision generalement optimiste, caracterisee par la presence constante d'une forme tonique d'humour. Cependant, comme nous le montrons dans notre derniere partie, le grotesque dickensien subit un changement radical dans les romans de la maturite. L'humour cede la place a la satire amere et decapante. Les oeuvres ne sont plus peuplees de bouffons mais de creatures terifiantes. En fait, dickens consacre toute son attention au monstrueux et a l'incongru dans sa derniere periode. La situation tragiqsue de l'angleterre pendant les annees cinquante du siecle dernier est sans doute la cause de pareille "revolution"
Dickens and his oeuvre have been the target of a welter of different approaches. This is mainly due to the complexity of theman and the richness of his text. Yet there is a subject which has rarely been undertaken : dickens's development as a grotesque artist. This is indeed the aim of this study ; and we have managed to realize it through the analysis of many dickensian characters. Bearing in mind the ambiguous nature of the grotesque, the opening part is meant to offer a historical and linguistic description of the term itself. It also provides a number of ancient and modern views on it. This point clarified, our attention is directed to dickens's relation to some strands of the tradition of the grotesque, namely popular theatre and visual satire. His faithfulness to these traditions is made crystal clear in our second part. The books of youth comprise situations which normally belong to commedia dell'arte and pantomime. Such is the case of some characters ; their eccentricities and idiosyncrasies relate them to the marvellous world of harlequin, pantaloon, clown, and punch ; whereas others seem to have been simply taken frim hogarth's volumes. It should be noted that in spite of the presence of social and political issues, this period remains generally sunny thanks to dickens's fresh, flowing humour. However, as it is discussed in the closing part, in his mature works dickens's grotesque art undergoes a radical change. Sparkling humour leaves its place to bitter, sharp-edged satire ; and the novels are not peopled with buffoons, but terrible creatures. In fact, the monstrous and incongruous received dickens's utmost attention during the last stage of his career. The tragic situation of england in the 1850's is without doubt the principal cause of such a "revolution"

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.

This work argues that the dynamics of the oral and of the literate consciousness play a vital role in the characterization of Bleak House. Through an application of Walter Ong's synthesis of orality/literacy research, Krook's residual orality is seen to play a greater role in his characterization than his more frequently discussed spontaneous combustion. Also, the role orality and literacy plays in understanding Dickens's satire of "philanthropic shams" is analyzed. This study concludes that an awareness of orality and literacy gives the reader of Bleak House a consistent framework for evaluating the moral quality of its characters and for understanding the broader social message underlying Dickens's topical satire.

The field of research of this thesis covers three main areas: the novels of Charles Dickens; fairy tales and storytelling; and notions of women as reflected in feminist literary theory. A reading of selected novels by Dickens provides the primary source. That he copiously drew on fairy tales has been explored in such notable works as Harry Stone's, but the thesis concentrates on Dickens 's propensity in his creation of female protagonists to give them a voice which is vivified through fairy tale. The analysis of fairy story through narrative theory and feminist literary theory functions as the basis of an exploration of the role female narrative voices play in a reading of the novels which reveals a more sympathetic vision of the feminine than has been observed hitherto. The context of this study is Victorian attitudes to women and that modem criticism has not sufficiently acknowledged Dickens's insight into of the condition of women; much of this is discovered through an examination of his use of fairy tale wherein the woman is bearer of imaginative and emotional capacities magically bestowed. The research aims to counter the view of Dickens's novels as being sexist, through the iIluminatory characteristics of fairy tale. Dickens activates his women characters by means of their often being tellers of tales replete with fairy tale imagery, and their tales are almost always seminal to the novelist's moral purpose.

This thesis examines Dickens's presentation of evil women. In the course of my reading I discovered that most of the evil women in his novels are mothers, or mother-figures, a finding which altered the nature of my interpretation and led to closer examination of these characters, rather than the prostitutes and criminals who may have been viewed negatively by Nineteenth century society and thereby condemned as evil. Among the many unsympathetically portrayed mothers and mother-figures in Dickens's works, the three that are most interesting are Lady Dedlock, Miss Havisham, and Mrs Skewton. Madame Defarge initiates the discussion, however, as a seminal figure among the many evil women in the novels. Psychoanalytical and socio-historic readings grounded in Nineteenth century conceptions of womanhood provide background material for this thesis. Though useful and informative, however, these areas of study are not sufficient in themselves. The theory that shapes the arguments of this thesis is defined by Steven Cohan, who argues strongly that the demand for psychological coherence as a requisite of character obscures the imaginative power of character as textual construct, and who both refutes and develops character theory as it is argued by Baruch Hochman. Cohan's theory is also finally closer to that outlined by Thomas Docherty, who provides a complex reading of character as ultimately "unknowable".

This project investigates the social role of gentleman in Victorian England as defined in two Victorian novels, Dinah Maria Mulock's John Halifax, Gentleman and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations. Mulock and Dickens promote the middle-class gentleman as a role that prioritizes the fulfillment of duty. Mulock's protagonist, John Halifax, displays this gentlemanliness throughout his social and economic rise. He bridges the upper and lower classes and embodies both a model and a pathway to middleclass gentlemanliness. Dickens's protagonist, Pip, develops this middle-class gentlemanliness as he learns from his own and four other characters' experiences. Dickens separates the inward, duty-focused gentleman and the outward, appearance-focused gentleman in the four characters that influence Pip, thus emphasizing their relationship and the power of social role encoding. These two novels reveal the performances of roles as social constructions that utilize the power of group definitions and the role writers play in shaping those definitions.
Department of English

Many of Charles Dickens‟s peripheral characters have not received critical attention through a de-centered reading in a single, unified body of work. For reasons which are related largely to his biography, Dickens had a deep and abiding interest in the members of the lower classes who feature prominently in his novels. This thesis, on the eve of the bi-centennial anniversary of the author‟s birth, examines his representations of a selection of these characters that appear to have been, to a large extent, forgotten and lie in obscurity, submerged in the vast storehouse of his creations. In his novels, Dickens vociferously champions the rights of the marginalised whilst he, simultaneously, evinces a discerning consciousness of their susceptibility to forms of conduct which he disapproved of. His empathy is, therefore, of a kind which is tinged with distrust, fear and, at times, repulsion. Central to this thesis is Dickens‟s ambivalence towards the proverbial small man/woman which is examined in terms of its genesis, development and resolution. In its engagement with these characters, this study draws, primarily, on the New Historicist (particularly the work of Stephen Greenblatt) and Cultural Materialist approaches to the reading of literary texts and is foregrounded in Raymond Williams‟s formulation of “structures of feeling”. Aligned to this, is Michel Foucault‟s conceptualizations of power. My Introduction defines the parameters within which this thesis is situated. The need for a study of this nature is outlined and an overview of the theoretical positions, intimated above, is presented. The central ideas which link Foucault, Greenblatt and Williams are clearly spelt out and their relevance to Dickens‟s peripheral characters is anticipated. Of the 14 novels discussed, David Copperfield, because of its strong autobiographical connections, is read as most crucial in the shaping of Dickens‟s attitudes towards the lower classes. Chapter 1 is therefore devoted, exclusively, to this novel which serves, initially, as a gateway to this thesis and, thereafter, as its nodal point. Chapter 2 (“Voices in the Crowd”) picks up the links from David Copperfield as it explores the realm of public space. It identifies and draws to the centre those characters that constitute the crowd, as it is seen in everyday contexts. Chapter 3 (“The World of the Public-House”) takes the reader into the Victorian tavern – that microcosm of society where “social energies” are seen to “circulate” in complex configurations. Chapter 4 (“Servants and Dickens‟s Double Vision”) discusses the representatives of the lower classes as they are seen in their roles as servants – a crucial area of Victorian “cultural poetics” and one that was very near to Dickens‟s heart. In my Conclusion I revisit the question of Dickens‟s ambivalence and situate this in the context of the posthumously published, and relatively unknown, The Life of Our Lord. It would seem that many commentators tend to allude to Dickens‟s ambivalence without actually offering a detailed examination of the peripheral characters, as they are seen in different contexts. In bringing together some of the smallest of the small in a unified body of work (for what may possibly be the first time), this thesis offers fresh insights into the ways in which the writer knew and understood the lower classes.
Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2011.