Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Don L. F. Nilsen
and Alleen Pace Nilsen
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Dickens has a special talent for evoking strong emotions
that result in laughter, terror, and/or pathos. These
emotions are used to support his dominant themes and
effects, and although the earlier novels tend to be
lighter in tone and the later novels more serious, there
is a seriousness in his humor thoughout his writing
career.
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Charles Dickens’s novels fall into two categories:
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Two Kinds of Humours Characters
Northrup Frye feels that Dickens has two types of
humours characters, the genial, generous, and
lovable ones, and the absurd or sinister ones.
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Dickens Characters are Distorted
Elton Smith says that for Charles Dickens,
everyone is larger than life or smaller than life, but
never just life size.
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Targets of Dickens Satires
Dickens novels can be seen as ironic tragi-
comedies of deception.
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The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837)
Many of Dickens’s novels were first published serially in
London newspapers.
The Pickwick Papers is a burlesque of the touring and sporting clubs in England in
Victorian times.
Both Samuel Pickwick and Don Quixote run around trying to redress evils, and
both (because of their naiveté) invariably end up looking ridiculous.
About eighty percent of the “Wellerisms” in The Pickwick Papers are either
morbid, or else they deal with such things as debt, unhappy marriage,
misanthropy, or general social discomfort. When John Smauker says that the
Bath waters are “killibeate,” Sam responds, “I don’t know much about that
‘ere…. I thought they’d a wery strong flavour o’ warm flat irons.”
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Nicholas Nickleby (1837-1839)
Dickens describes Mr. Squeers as being not
prepossessing. “He had but one eye, and the popular
prejudice runs in favor of two. The eye he had was
unquestionably useful, but decidedly not ornamental:
being of a greenish grey, and in shape resembling the
fan-light of a street door.”
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Mr. Squeers “wore a white neckerchief with long
ends, and a suit of trousers a great deal too
short; he appeared ill at ease in his clothes, as if
he were in a perpetual state of astonishment at
finding himself so respectable.”
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Oliver Twist (1838-1839)
In Oliver Twist, Mr. Gamsfield is the overseer of the
chimney sweeps. He makes readers laugh by lighting
dry straw fires while the boys are in the chimneys.
“such as hanging over the side of the coach at great risk of his
life, and staring in with his great goggle eyes, which seemed in
hers the more horrible from his face being upside down.”
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Unnecessary Detail?
George Orwell considers “unnecessary detail” to
have been the most salient feature of Dickens’s
writing. An example is when Mr. Jack Hopkins is
telling a story at Bob Sawyer’s party about a child
who had swallowed his sister’s necklace:
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In Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr. Scadder is described as
“swinging backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair,
with one of his legs planted high up against the door-
post, and the other doubled up under him as if he were
hatching his foot.”
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Robert Polhemus says that in Martin Chuzzlewit,
Dickens considers America to be “a land of
Pecksniffian manifest destiny.”
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When Martin and Mark first arrive in New York, they hear
the cries of the newsboys:
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David Copperfield (1850)
In David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber is described as “a
stoutish middle-aged person in a brown surcoat and
black tights and shoes, with no more hair upon his head
(which was a large one, and very shining) than there is
upon an egg.”
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When David Copperfield shakes hands with
Uriah Heep, he says that his handshake feels as
if he had just “grasped a frog, his lizardlike
spacticity, his involuntary writhing and
screwing up of the face, and his red shadowless
eyes.”
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Great Expectations (1861)
In Great Expectations, Miss Havisham can be seen
as a tragicomic figure.
The character of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop was based on
Mary Hogarth, Dickens’s sister-in-law, who died in Dickens’s arms at
the age of seventeen. When the character Little Nell died, all of
England wept.
Mr. Micawber was based on Dickens’s father, and Mrs. Nickleby was
based on his mother. Mrs. Nickleby speaks in loquacious
monologues that are filled with delightful absurdities.
Dickens’s mother didn’t realize that she was the model for Mrs.
Nickleby, and Dickens once wrote about ‘Mrs. Nickleby herself, sitting
bodily before me in a solid chair [who] once asked me whether I
believed there ever was such a woman.”
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Mr. Squeers, the schoolmaster in Nicholas
Nickleby was also taken from real life, and the
portrait was painted so well, and so close to real
life that the person on whom the sketch was
based suffered from a premature death.
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Charles Dickens’s Humor
Charles Dickens’s Humor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
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