My first extract is “Murdering the innocents”. Life was very difficult for the poor in the Victorian times. It was very different depending on your class. Dickens used the novels to put across his opinion about the poor peoples hard lives. For example there were no laws about how long people could work; this had an effect on the amount of machinery – related accidents that happened in the Victorian era. Many children were working too long resulting in injury and death. Those children who were luckier enough to go to schools lives were better in the sense there getting an education but there teachers were strict and used the cane and there were large classes teaching a wide range of students. Dickens makes us engage with the characters. The title of the first extract is ‘murdering the innocents’. This suggests the extract is about murder, it suggests killing the children, and however the extract doesn’t involve murder of children. The title is a metaphor that in my opinion means the killing of the things that make a child, a child. It suggests ‘the innocents’ are being destroyed. It also refers to the section in the bible where the King Herod orders all children under the age of 2 to be killed so the ‘new king’ wouldn’t be a threat to him. In this extract Dickens explores poor people. He’s attempting to show rich people how poor peoples’ lives are difficult compared with theirs. Dickens wants to make the point that in his time school was only about facts and figures. He wanted the children to have an imagination so he was very critical o the education they received. For example in the extract Gradgrind asks Bitzer for his definition of a horse, the definition was not an imaginative one, you would not be able to picture a horse ... ... middle of paper ... ...s trying to put across his message to show the children there are people less fortunate than themselves and that they should appreciate what they have, also I think he’s trying to make them understand how the poor’s lives are shut away from the rich. I found the description of the boys on the boat most effective as it’s about the children attempting to row the boat on the thick lake of dye and pollution. The sections show that education and industrial towns have moved on from the industrial revolution, education has moved forward by having a lot more schools, teachers and laws about ill treatment towards pupils. Furthermore children under the age of 13 aren’t allowed to work at all and ones over 13 have limited hours up to the age of around 15, 16 where more variety is available, also most of the pollution has gone leaving clear skies again, and machinery is safer.
Charles Dickens is a famous novelist who was born on February 7TH 1812, Portsmouth England. His novel ‘Oliver Twist’ had been serialized and to also show Dickens purposes, which was to show the powerful links between poverty and crime. The novel is based on a young boy called Oliver Twist; the plot is about how the underprivileged misunderstood orphan, Oliver the son of Edwin Leeford and Agnes Fleming, he is generally quiet and shy rather than being aggressive, after his parents past away he is forced to work in a workhouse and then forced to work with criminals. The novel reveals a lot of different aspects of poverty, crime and cruelty which Dickens had experienced himself as a young boy in his disturbing and unsupportive childhood, due to his parents sent to prison so therefore Charles, who was already filled with misery, melancholy and deprivation had started working at the age of twelve at a factory to repay their debt.
Dickens describes the conditions of the village with a pathetic tone; throughout the passage, the village, and its people are described with uses of anaphora to emphasize the conditions that he so despises. Furthermore, the passage uses short descriptions to summarize the pathetic that he has. For example, the first paragraph ends with: “... [T]he men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a
Dickens used his great talent by describing the city London were he mostly spent his time. By doing this Dickens permits readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the aged city, London. This ability to show the readers how it was then, how ...
Price, Martin. ed., Dickens: A Collection of Critical Essays Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967
The majority of individuals of the Victorian era were dealing with the effects of industrialization, unemployment, and namely the poverty. This lack of jobs required individuals and families to force their children to find any type of work, be it working in coal mines, selling their bodies, or even stealing. One way children would try to make money was through pickpocketing. This is seen towards the end of Dickens’ Journalistic sketch where he tells of the “other prisoners—boys of ten, […] going joyfully to prison as a place of food and shelter” (Dickens 3). The poverty “70 per cent of the population” (Black xliv) is experiencing, is so extreme that these young boys are thankful for being arrested and sent to prison because they are guaranteed food and a place to
Dickens exquisitely uses foreshadowing as a tool to give the reader a way to have some kind of idea of the evens to come and the give the reader some kind of knowledge of how the peasants intend to carry their plans of destruction out by using metaphors. The turmoil between the aristocracy and the peasants has been summed up into the metaphor of the storm. This metaphor truly helps the reader have a grasp on the violence and destruction going on at that time because a Revolution, much like a storm, causes demolition to all things around it. This metaphor is used to enhance the reading experience by cluing the reader in on the minor details of the plans of the Revolutionaries, so they are not confused in later chapters.
...remonde bloodline, most of which is innocent, must be exterminated to compensate for the deaths of her two siblings. The distinctions between the two women are especially evident when they engage in battle over the Evremonde family because they are speaking in different languages. Neither can understand the other linguistically, nor on a moral level. The message Dickens is attempting to convey through these characters is that of the many applications of passion, such zeal is best employed “with the vigorous tenacity of love [because it is] always so much stronger than hate” (365). In a decision between using one’s energy for love or hate, it is more productive and personally satisfying to choose the path of love because it is able to overcome that of hate.
In the opening Dickens uses a narrator who speaks in the first person. This brings the reader straight into the scene, immediately catching th...
Throughout the novel, Dickens employs imagery to make the readers pity the peasants, have compassion for the innocent nobles being punished, and even better understand the antagonist and her motives. His use of personified hunger and description of the poor’s straits made the reader pity them for the situation caused by the overlord nobles. However, Dickens then uses the same literary device to alight sympathy for the nobles, albeit the innocent ones! Then, he uses imagery to make the reader better understand and perhaps even feel empathy for Madame Defarge, the book’s murderous villainess. Through skillful but swaying use of imagery, Dickens truly affects the readers’ sympathies.
Readers of Charles Dickens' journalism will recognize many of the author's themes as common to his novels. Certainly, Dickens addresses his fascination with the criminal underground, his sympathy for the poor, especially children, and his interest in the penal system in both his novels and his essays. The two genres allow the author to address these matters with different approaches, though with similar ends in mind.
Dickens knew how hard-pressed life was for thousands of English families in mid-ninteenth century England, and he knew the legal side of such desperation--a jungle of suspicion and fear and hate. He was especially attentive [if] . . . hungry, jobless men, women, children with few if any prospects became reduced to a fate not only marginal with respect to its "socioeconomic" character but also with respect to its very humanity. (575)
Charles Dickens is one of the most famous writers of the Victorian Age. This period is known for industrialization which brought about many problems. Workers were trying to fight for the rights which were taken from them. Dickens depicts this struggle in many of his works. In Hard Times he focuses on the new way of thinking, a result of the development of technology. The reader is introduced to the new philosophy applied to the upbringing of Victorian children, represented by Thomas Gradgrind and his off spring. This type of education had many negative effects on these young minds. One of them is dehumanization which is noticeable in the acts of Louisa and Tom Gradgrind. This research paper is going to focus on Dickens’ portrait of the Gradgrinds’ education and its
Charles Dickens is one of the most popular and ingenious writers of the XIX century. He is the author of many novels. Due to reach personal experience Dickens managed to create vivid images of all kinds of people: kind and cruel ones, of the oppressed and the oppressors. Deep, wise psychoanalysis, irony, perhaps some of the sentimentalism place the reader not only in the position of spectator but also of the participant of situations that happen to Dickens’ heroes. Dickens makes the reader to think, to laugh and to cry together with his heroes throughout his books.
Mr. Gradgrind was a prominent school head that believed in “realities, facts, and calculations.” He is described as a cold-hearted man that strictly forbids the fostering of imagination and emotion, especially in his two children: Tom and Louisa (Dickens 5). Mr. Gradgrind raises his children in Coketown, a Capitalistic industrial town that Dickens calls, a waste-yard with “litter of barrels and old iron, the shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, shrouded in a veil of mist and rain” (128). In this town that seems to be impenetrable to the sun’s rays, his children grow up lacking social connections, mor...
In this novel, no one commits an entirely unselfish act. Even those characters that appear to be unselfish, help others only to fulfill their need to be seen as benevolent. For Dickens to rail against social inequality and not rail against the immoral and inherent selfishness of man, is an oversight that helped to embed the social caste system in England that pervades it to this day.