Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born in the south of England in 1812. He works in a shoe-blacking factory for a few months and this experience was never forgotten. The poor and the oppressed are present in his fiction. He travelled and wrote accounts of his journeys.

He wrote fourteen novels: Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby (adventure novels centred around the heroes that give title to the books), The Old Curiosity Shop (sentimental story), David Copperfield (Dickens's most autobiographical novel and revisits his painful childhood), Hard Times (shows the class struggle in industrial society), ecc

THEME: the exploitation of child labour, the ill-treatment of pupils in hideous schools, unsafe factory conditions, the plight of the working class.

OLIVER TWIST

Is a sort of fairy tale in which good triumphs over evil. The 'workhouse' where Oliver and his companions live is based on 'charitable' institutions of the time which treated the poor as if poverty was a crime; the aim of Dickens's satire is to expose a form of public charity which eliminates poverty by starving the poor.

The scene is not realistic.

Summary of Oliver Twist: Oliver is an orphan brought up in a workhouse, an institution for poor people in London. He falls into the clutches of a thief and, although he's natural honesty remains uncorrupted, he is arrested on suspicion of stealing from an old gentlman; this old gentlman will discovered as his grandfather. The novel closes with a happy ending.

Nell'arte il tema dell'illusione viene trattato dagli impressionisti; la realtà nei loro quadri non è rappresentata così com'è, ma secondo le impressioni che suscita all'artista; essa è quindi un'illusione.