di Giulio Armando Palmieri – 5^C –
| Charles Dickens is considered by many the greatest and most contemporary novelists of English literature. His whole body of work spins around the diverse realities of the Victorian society. Dickens himself, as a child, was a victim of the exploitation provided by the hypocritical attitude of the ruling class, the progressive one, due to which apparent respectability and dignity faced the poor’s humiliating condition. |
| Since his very first works, such as “Sketches” (1836) which he signed as “Boz”, the novelist’s critical point of view emerged by describing detailed gentry’s behaviors and clichés. In 1837 he started the composition of his most famous novel “Oliver Twist” where he openly denounced the appalling environment of workhouses, accurate synthesis of the evils surrounding the industrial revolution, longing for social reforms that highlighted, in my opinion, the novelist’s socialist tendencies. |
| Oliver Twist’s character also reflects Dickens’s muddy past and his will to bring the social attention to the children’s awful working conditions, as well as the focus on kids’ innocence facing the adult’s immoral attitude. |
| The latter is deeply depicted in the novelist’s masterpiece, “Hard Times”, through which he wanted to warn people about London’s pollution, by creating an imaginary town, Coketown, where industrial sewage wasted the landscape. Here, Dickens’s use of parody-characters, such as Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby, reflects his aim to make fun of social stereotypes while keeping the readers’ interest gripping. |
| Dickens’s greatness lies, indeed, in his elegant and sarcastic way to condemn society’s uneven realities, ultimate consequence of the phenomenon that came to history by the name of “Victorian Compromise”. |
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