Categories: All - fiction - communication - victorian - urbanization

by Antonino Rubino 4 years ago

1183

VICTORIAN NOVEL

During the Victorian era, English fiction experienced a significant transformation, marked by an increase in readership and the evolution of prose to cater to diverse tastes. Novels became a popular medium for expressing opinions and were often published serially in newspapers, making literature more accessible to the working class.

VICTORIAN NOVEL

New printing machines

Cheaper price

Urbanization and better way of communication

VICTORIAN NOVEL

The greatest age of English fiction

Increasing number of readers
Prose became more suitable to everybody's tastes

Stories were published serially, on newspaper

1820

After, books were printed in separate parts in monthly subdivision

This method modified the structure of the novel

Popular appeal to working class

Mass literature

Recourse to the sensational

There were different gemre, but the two most recurring were social novels and the novels of manners

Crimes, victims, punishments, also helped the writer to focus on the social events of his time

CHARLES DICKENS

Dickens' style

He created a great number of plots, sublots and characters

He used fiction to denounce the evils and vices of his society

He did not advocate for change, even if participating to some protests

Dickens’ characters are divided into good and evil ones

They are usually flat characters, even if sometimes round characters are present

Dickens was not usually interested in the spiritual side of his characters

Dickens is a very subtle observer of the Victorian life

The painter of London Life

He could give us a very detailed description of British social and everyday life

Detailed sketch of manners, usages, and clothing of people of his own era

Dickens descriptions can be seen as photographs of his time

Dickens humor is linked with pathos that is also a very important side of his novels

The sequences of events we see in his novels is originated from the serial form, but also from his creativity

Personal life

He wrote some historical novels like A Tale of Two Cities, in 1859, when Dickens was already an affirmed novelist

he had already written Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Hard Times

His first novel was “sketches by bars”

Then he wrote the Pickwick Papers

A series of journalistic sketches with episodes of everyday life

He was the first editor of the daily news, and of some periodical

In 1836 he began his literary career

He married in 1836, to the daughter of a colleague, but he separated in 1858, for he had fallen in love with an actress

He also learned shorthand and became a journalist in 1830

At 15 he left school and started working in a court in a Lawyer’s office

This helped giving a background to some of his novels, especially Bleak House

Through a legacy, his family’s fortunes improved, and he was able to go back to school.

He was sent to a school in Hempstead, where he learned not so much and made no friend

Charles was thus forced to leave school and start working at Warren's Blacking Warehouse

This factory was dirty and cold, and his mates were rough and violent

Charles felt humiliated and he refered to it in his works

In 1823 his father, who worked as a clerk in the navy pay office, was sent to London, and Charles had to move, too

As his father had a lot of debt, he was forced by his creditors into a prison in 1824, leaving his family without any source of income

He went to school and began to read novels by Defoe

He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth

A mix of complicated plots

Episodic structure to the plot

“make them love, make them cry, make them wait”

The writers had to speed up the rhythm of the narration and find new devices to catch readers

Excessive length of some of those stories

novels were published as books and were quite expansive

It became the means to express opinions