CHARLES DICKENS

Life: He had a difficult life and a lot of problems to make ends meet, his father was imprisoned for debts,
and at 12 years old he started working at first as a shoe-shine and in a shoe-blacking factory, then as an
apprentice in an attorneys office, and after that as a reporter in the courts of Law. Works: Pickwick Papers
was his first success, it was an humorous novel; David Copperfield, an autobiographical and sentimental
novel; Oliver Twist, a social and humanitarian novel; A Christmas Carrol, his most famous short story.
Most of his works were at first published in instalments.
INFLUENCES: He was influenced by the 18th picaresque novel, in the division of the plot in a sequence of
events and concerning the life and adventures of a central character. His descriptive technique for people and
landscapes was inspired by Walter Scott; and from the theatre he took the art of dialogue and some
sensational and melodramatic devices.
FEATURES AND THEMES
A writer has a reforming mission: he attacked abuses(exploitation of children, ill-treatment of the pupils
at work, unsafe working conditions, injustices made by the penal code, imprisonment, unhealthy living
and working conditions, rich peoples selfishness, the conditions of the working classes) in Victorian
Society, accepting its basic values (respectability, good manners, duty, hard work, probity, faith in
progress, family and fathers and husbands authority, attention for money, prudish attitude towards sex),
but condemned its hypocrisy.
Humour in characters drawing, in dialogues, in episodes.
Talent in portraying the characters, who are not types and who have above all external qualities, not the
spiritual side described
Detailed description of the environment
DAVID COPPERFIELD: The book concerns the growing-up of a boy, who, orphaned at an early age,
experiences considerable hardship. He is ill-treated by his stepfather, then forced to work under appalling
conditions in a London warehouse. This is a marked contrast to his idyllic early childhood, before the re-
marriage and death of his gentle mother. David's life improves greatly when he runs away from his job to
seek out his Aunt, Betsey. She sends him to school and arranges for him to board with a lawyer whose
daughter, Agnes, proves to be a good friend to David. Once his education is completed, David is articled in
law and meets Dora, whom he loves passionately and marries. When Dora dies, David turns to Agnes for
comfort. She has quietly loved him all along and, by the end of the book, David has matured enough to
return her love.
OLIVER TWIST its central theme is the hardship faced by the dispossessed and those of the outside of
polite society. Oliver is born in a workhouse and treated cruelly there as was the norm at the time for
pauper children, in particular by a parish council official. He escapes the workhouse and runs away to
London. Here he receives an education in villainy from a criminal gang. Oliver is rescued by the intervention
of a benefactor - Mr Brownlow - but the mysterious Monks gets the gang to kidnap the boy again. Nancy
intervenes but is murdered after she has showed some redeeming qualities and has discovered Monks
sinister intention. The story closes happily and with justice for Oliver, who discovers his origins and all the
cruel people he had met are arrested. The narrator is a voice outside the novel who shows pity for the
children and ironical dislike for the adults world. The childrens point of view is mainly employed. The
workhouse offers the poor the opportunity to starve slowly as opposed to quick starvation on the streets. For
the workhouse, the undertakers bill is a major budget item due to the large number of deaths. Oliver and his
young companions suffer the tortures of slow starvation. One night at dinner, one child tells the others that
if he does not have another bowl of gruel he might eat one of them. Terrified, the children at the workhouse
cast lots, determining that whoever loses shall be required to ask for more food for the boy. Oliver loses, and
after dinner, the other children insist that Oliver ask for more food at supper. His request so shocks the
authorities that they offer five pounds as a reward to anyone who will take Oliver off of their hands.
ANALYSIS The workhouse functions as a sign of the moral hypocrisy of the working class. The Victorian
middle class saw cleanliness as a moral virtue, and the workhouse was supposed to rescue the poor from the
immoral condition of filth. In Dickenss novel it is a filthy placeWorkhouses were established to save the
poor from starvation, disease, and filth, but in fact they end up visiting precisely those hardships on the poor.
Furthermore, Mr. Bumbles actions underscore middle-class hypocrisy, especially when he criticizes Oliver
for not gratefully accepting his dire conditions. Bumble himself, however, is fat and well-dressed, and the
entire workhouse board is full of fat gentlemen who preach the value of a diet for workhouse residents. The
workhouse reproduces the vices it is supposed to erase. One workhouse boy, with a wild, hungry look,
threatens in jest to eat another boy. The suggestion is that workhouses force their residents to become
cannibals. The workhouse also mimics the institution of slavery: the residents are fed and clothed as little as
possible and required to work at tasks assigned by the board, and they are required to put on a face of
grateful acceptance of the miserable conditions that have been forced on them. When Oliver does not, he is
sold rather than sent away freely. Oliver is asking for more gruel not for himself alone but for the other boys.
The assistants react exaggerating and punishing him.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS Pip lives with his older sister and her husband. One day, while visiting his
parents' grave, Pip encounters a convict, Magwitch, who he helps escape by providing him with a file and
food. Pip is hired as a playmate for Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, Estella, who he falls in love with. Pip
finds out that he has a benefactor and assumes that it is Miss Havisham. He moves to the city of London with
great expectations of increasing his social status. During this metamorphosis, Pip neglects his friendships
with Biddy and Joe. As time passes, Pip meets his true benefactor, Magwitch, who made a fortune after being
exiled from England. Magwitch wanted to repay Pip for helping him escape earlier in the novel. Pip in return
for the large fortune must keep Magwitch in hiding near a river, since he is forbidden in England. Pip learns
that Estella, who he has long obsessed over, has married Bentley Drummle. Suddenly, Miss Havisham's
estate goes on fire, and Pip courageously saves Miss Havisham. It is then revealed that Magwitch is Estella's
father. In an attempt to flee, Magwitch is caught, but dies before his conviction. Pip falls ill, and is nursed
back to health by Joe, who marries Biddy after the death of Mrs. Joe. It is also revealed that Estella is
educated by suffering, and the two go off on their separate ways.

Possible Themes: 1) Gratitude - Pip does not show gratitude towards Joe. 2) Suffering - Miss Havisham
suffers from having lived her entire life in the past3) Obsession - Pip is obsessed with Estella.4) Prejudice -
Estella resents Pip for not being refined. Pip is appalled by Magwitch's appearance and behavior.5) Greed -
Pip only wants to heighten his social and economic status.6) Envy - Pip envies Estella's wealth and social
status. 7) Loneliness - Pip often visits the graveyard where his parents are buried. The meeting As an infant,
Philip Pirrip was unable to pronounce either his first name or his last; doing his best, he called himself Pip,
and the name stuck. Now Pip, a young boy, is an orphan living in his sisters house in the marsh country in
southeast England. One evening, Pip sits in the isolated village churchyard, staring at his parents
tombstones. Suddenly, a horrific man, growling, dressed in rags, and with his leg in chains, springs out from
behind the gravestones and seizes Pip. This escaped convict questions Pip harshly and demands that Pip
bring him food and a file with which he can saw away his leg irons. The first chapters of Great Expectations
set the plot in motion while introducing Pip and his world. As both narrator and protagonist, Pip is naturally
the most important character in Great Expectations: the novel is his story, told in his words, and his
perceptions utterly define the events and characters of the book. As a result, Dickenss most important task as
a writer in Great Expectations is the creation of Pips character. Because Pips is the voice with which he
tells his story, Dickens must make his voice believably human while also ensuring that it conveys all the
information necessary to the plot. In this first section, Pip is a young child, and Dickens masterfully uses
Pips narration to evoke the feelings and problems of childhood. At the beginning of the novel, for instance,
Pip is looking at his parents gravestones, a solemn scene which Dickens renders comical by having Pip
ponder the exact inscriptions on the tombstones. When the convict questions him about his parents names,
Pip recites them exactly as they appear on the tombstones, indicating his youthful innocence while
simultaneously allowing Dickens to lessen the dramatic tension of the novels opening. As befits a well-
meaning child whose moral reasoning is unsophisticated, Pip is horrified by the convict. But despite his
horror, he treats him with compassion and kindness.
OSCAR WILDE
Born in a upper-middle-class family, he went to a Protestant school, he studied at Trinity College and then at
Oxford University. His life is famous because he lived as a dandy, eccentric, extravagant, elegant, expert in
brilliant conversation, witticisms. He travelled even to The USA, where he declared Ive nothing to declare
except my genius at the Customers office. Then he went to Paris and met Mallarm, Degas, Pissarro, and
he was impressed by the works of Flaubert and Huysmans. After his marriage and the success and prestige of
the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, he was accused of homosexuality and arrested, then condemned to 2
years hard labour. His plays and books were withdrawn and he was victim of ostracism(he wrote the poem
The Ballad of Reading Gaol to describe his prison experiences). When he went out, he adopted the name of
Sebastian Melmoth (inspired by a Gothic Novel by Maturin and the Christian Martyr, but also by the arrows
on his prisons uniform. He spent the last years of his life in Naples, Switzerland and Paris dying after
embracing Roman Catholicism. Other works are plays, divided in early plays and society plays(The
importance of being Earnest is one of them). LITERARY PRODUCTION: Poems, Essays, fiction, drama,
fairy stories.
Disciple and leader of aestheticism: Arts for arts sake(art has no aim but its own perfection): only Art as
the cult of beauty could prevent the murder of the soul. In life the artists duty is to cultivate beauty and give
aesthetic pleasure. The Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray became the manifesto of English Aestheticism.
He rejected Victorian didacticism in the novel because he said that there is not a moral or an immoral book:
books are well or badly written. His name is also connected with Decadentism, but he is different from
Decadentists because he didnt research isolation from the world but public success and popularity. His life
was marked by Hedonism, too. Even if it was considered immoral when it appeared, the book has a sort of
morality with the end read like a punishment of a life only devoted to the pursuit of sensation. The lack of
any realistic description(Dorians crimes are only hinted at)diminishes its effectiveness. He was Victorian in
his esteem of the Principle Arts for arts sake as a moral and aesthetic imperative. The artist has to be
coherent and full of integrity, always in accord with himself. As a dramatist he got contrasting opinions: his
plays were considered superficial, unreal, satirical, witty, elegant, stylish, mediocre, farcical, delightful,
barren, delusive. But its important to give up any sort of generalization, because there are a lot of differences
between early plays and society plays, and in society plays the first are more sentimental and melodramatic,
following the Victorian audiences expectations. Conventional morals are still present but ridiculed.
The importance of being Earnest is original, brilliant and unconventional. The theatrical ingredients are
better balanced. There are not sentimentalism and melodrama, there are frivolous and absurd situations, the
main and secondary plots are in a perfect unity and the characters, not analysed in depth, are vividly
sketched. The language is rich in irony, witticism, epigrams, paradoxes, nonsense. No moral judgement is in,
but satire of upper-class English people. The plot turns on a misunderstanding resulting from the lies of 2
upper-class young men, John (known as Jack)and Algernon. John was adopted by an old gentleman, and he
often goes to London to visit a fictitious brother, Ernest. When in London, he falls in love with Gwendolen,
but her mother doesnt agree about their marriage. Algernon lives in London but he visits in the country a
fictitious invalid friend Bumbury. He falls in love with Jacks ward. Misunderstandings about their identity
cause funny situations, but everything ends well to everybodys satisfaction. The importance of being
Earnest: not plot (mechanical), but Characterization and brilliant dialogue. The characters bringing a serious
message seem not have credibility. The flat characters bring the play to life. Comedy of manners. ACT 1
LADY BRACKNELLS INTERVIEW: The scene in which Jack proposes to Gwendolen portrays a reversal of
Victorian assumptions about gender roles. Propriety demanded that young women be weak and ineffectual,
helpless vessels of girlish admiration and passivity, while men were supposed to be authoritative and
competent. Here, however, Jack stammers ineffectually, and Gwendolen takes the whole business of the
marriage proposal out of his hands. Wilde has some fun with the rigidity of Victorian convention when he
has Gwendolen backtrack and insist that Jack start the whole proposal process over again, doing it properly.
The social commentary in this scene goes deeper than the Victorian concern with propriety. In the figure of
Gwendolen, a young woman obsessed with the name Ernest, and not with actual earnestness itself, Wilde
satirizes Victorian societys preoccupation with surface manifestations of virtue and its willingness to detect
virtue in the most superficial displays of decent behavior. The Ernest/earnest joke is a send-up of the whole
concept of moral duty, which was the linchpin of Victorian morality. Wilde uses Lady Bracknells interview
of Jack to make fun of the values of London society, which put a higher premium on social connections than
on character or goodness. More disquieting than the questions themselves is the order in which Lady
Bracknell asks them. Before she even gets to such matters as income and family, she wants to know if Jack
smokes, and she is pleased to hear that he does, since she considers smoking an antidote to idleness. Such
trivial questions suggest the vacuity of London society, where more weighty issues are of secondary
importance. The questions about Jacks family background, however, reveal Lady Bracknells darker side.
When Jack admits he has lost both his parents, Lady Bracknell replies with an elaborate pun: To lose one
parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Like so many
of Lady Bracknells pronouncements, this one is funny because its absurd. However, the statement also
reflects a heartlessness thats very real and not funny at all. Lady Bracknell responded in a similar way to
Bunburys lingering illness when she remarked, I must say . . . that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury
made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die. In pronouncements such as these, Lady Bracknell
reveals an unsettling notion that colored every aspect of Victorian life: poverty and misfortune are, to some
extent, an outcome of moral unworthiness.
Socialist: this term sounds strange if applied to a rebel and a dandy. He applies to politics the same ideas he
applies to Art: he envisages a sort of utopian socialism free from any real application because it has an end in
itself. Far from any form of authority, private property is abolished, man is happy and in harmony with
himself and his environment and art is appreciated by an artistic public made free from manual work by the
use of machinery. Its an utopian point of view. He avoids any real analysis of socialism and underlines the
importance of the only aspect he advocates in an ideology based on equality and social levelling,
INDIVIDUALISM. Only it let the man be free of any form of enslavement, the true perfection lies in what
man is not has. The future salvation of mankind is in this individualism. "The Soul of Man under Socialism"
is an 1891 essay by Oscar Wilde in which he expounds a libertarian socialist worldview. In "The Soul of
Man", Wilde argues that, under capitalism, "the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and
exaggerated altruismare forced, indeed, so to spoil them": instead of realizing their true talents, they waste
their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus,
caring people "seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they
see" in poverty, "but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it" because, "the proper aim
is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible." Wilde did not see kindness
or altruism as a problem but its misapplication in a way which leaves unaddressed the roots of the problem:
"the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were
those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who
suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England,
the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good" while preserving the system. In a
socialist society, people will have the possibility to realize their talents; "each member of the society will
share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society." Wilde added that "upon the other hand,
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to individualism" since individuals will no longer
need to fear poverty or starvation. This individualism would, in turn, protect against governments "armed
with economic power as they are now with political power" over their citizens. However, Wilde advocated
non-capitalist individualism: "of course, it might be said that the Individualism generated under conditions of
private property is not always, or even as a rule, of a fine or wonderful type" a critique which is "quite true."
In this way socialism, in Wilde's imagination, would free men from manual labour and allow them to devote
their time to creative pursuits, thus developing their soul, he ended declaring "The new individalism is the
new hellenism".
Open antagonist of the prevailing moral and religious code
The picture of Dorian Gray: The picture of the title is a splendid work painted by Basil Hallward of the
orphaned boy Dorian Gray who is the heir to a great fortune. Lord Henry and Hallward discuss the boy and
the remarkable painting. Dorian enters and declares that he would give his soul if he were always to be
young and the painting instead would grow old. Dorian leaves his fiance - the actress Sibyl Vane - because
through a single bad performance he claims that she has killed his love. She kills herself with poison and
Dorian is unaffected. So begins the tale of the boys descent into low society in London while still giving
dinners and musicals for high society. He is inspired by two things: the book Lord Henry sends him that
seems to predict his own life in dissecting every virtue and every sin from the past; and secondly the picture
of himself which grows steadily older and more vicious looking compared to his own mirror image which
remains young. Fanatical about the portrait, he is driven to murder and deception. As others are drawn into
this web of evil Dorian himself longs to return to innocence but his method is horrific and tragic. The
unobtrusive-third person narrator with an internal perspective since Dorian appears in the 2 nd chapter. The
characters are described by their own words and by the other characters, in a technique typical of drama.
Gothicism and aestheticism are the base of the novel.
Summary and Analysis : The Preface
The Preface is a series of epigrams, aphorisms or concise, witty sayings, that express the major points of
Oscar Wildes aesthetic philosophy. In short, the epigrams praise beauty and repudiate the notion that art
serves a moral purpose. They deal directly with art, artists, critics, and audience but only obliquely with the
novel. They speak to the importance of beauty espoused by the Aesthetic movement. The preface offers one
of Wildes most famous aphorisms: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written, or badly written. That is all. According to Wilde, the artist might consider the moral or immoral
lives of people as part of the subject matter of a work, but art itself is not meant to instruct the reader. The
true artist is not out to prove anything and makes no judgments of right or wrong. What people call vices
or virtues are merely materials for the artist. Those who attempt to go beneath the surface of a work, or to
read meaning into a symbol, do so at their own risk. Considerable disagreement about a work of art only
proves that the work is new, complex, and vital. Wilde concludes the preface by saying that it is fine to
create something useful so long as it is not admired as art. The only reason for creating something useless is
to admire it a great deal. Thus, All art is quite useless. That is, it exists for its own sake as art (art for arts
sake) and not for some moral purpose. The preface sets the tone for the book and lets the reader know that
The Picture of Dorian Gray will be a book of expansive ideas and wonderful language