1. Childhood In The Works Of Ch. Dickens three works by Charles Dickens were selected for analysis

This peculiar childish "point of view"

extends to the further development of events. Just as David cannot understand the episode with the flower, so he does not understand why he was sent to the Pegotti family for a while. He wholeheartedly enjoys the fishing idyll in Yarmouth and his friendship with little Emily, and is endlessly surprised by the changes that have taken place in the house during this time (which are not at all a surprise to the reader). And gradually there is a change in intonation: from a humorous "misunderstanding" of the romance episodes of this story, little David turns to horror at the injustice, callousness, cruelty of his new relatives, who enslave both himself and his childishly helpless mother. Then, instead of a cheerful childish misunderstanding, reflections appear. When David first realizes that his mother, for the sake of her new husband, hides her love for her son and denies him the usual affection, he goes upstairs, sits down on the bed with his arms crossed on his chest and thinks about it. And when this amazement at the cruelty of a harsh life that has replaced idyll reaches its apogee, then the amazement of the author of the novel himself is added to this amazement of the child. Another antidote to the gloomy world in the first part of the novel is the idyll in Yarmouth, where David, excommunicated from his hearth, spends several happy days. Everything here breathes with peace of mind - both the landscape and the people; a fisherman's house built in an old boat, the slow and calm fisherman Pegotti and his whole family appear before the gaze of a little romantic. David Copperfield rests here not as a child, but as an adult tired of life. The beating of waves against the walls of the closet, the uniform swaying of the whole house, the sound of the wind behind the wall bring peace and tranquility to his troubled soul. An important element in this soothing landscape is little Emily, the idol of the whole family. Love between David and Emily, unfolding in one of his next visits, is also fabulously idyllic. However, this brief moment of rest comes to an end. David's childhood also ends. It ends at the moment when he, it would seem, once and for all freed himself from all life's hardships, once again finding his grandmother Betsy, who had renounced him. These everyday hardships will revive again, but on a different, more real, more prosaic, more "adult" basis. David Copperfield will no longer be a romantic boy living in a fantasy world. A new stage in his biography will begin. David will work on the organization of his life in a bourgeois society. He will understand that with his limited funds (grandmother Betsy, his patroness, by that time loses her fortune), he needs to work hard to win a place in life. Romantic love, fishing hut, waves and winds of coastal England will be far behind. This is how the first part of the novel ends. The second part of the novel, just as conditionally as we called the first "childhood", could be called a "transitional period." David Copperfield is not yet an adult, an active person here. David becomes "a boy from a good family," "another boy," as he describes himself. The "rebellious" period of his life is over. He enters a school where gradual children study under the guidance of the benevolent and gentle Doctor Strong; he lives in the house of the equally gentle and even humiliated Mr. Wickfield, and over him extends his care and love, a quiet and heartfelt, angelic Agnes. He is loved and taken care of, and the era of romantic adventures of a hunted down but proud soul of a boy, as well as terrible villains - brother and sister Murdstone, go into the distant past. Thus, David's active biography ends for a while. It will begin again when he becomes an adult, when new activities, new people, new love appear in his life. Therefore, the personal life of David Copperfield is covered here in one or two chapters, which tells about the principles on which his new existence was arranged. Although David himself is not a direct participant in the action of these chapters of the novel, several destinies, several tragedies unfold before him. The author uses this part of the novel in order to reveal the biographies of his side characters, one way or another connected with the hero. David Copperfield appears here as a more or less passive spectator. But in this way, sympathizing with the suffering of people close to him, he finally becomes an adult, a "character."

Much is revealed to him for the first time, he tells a lot in his old, "incomprehensible" manner, he will reach a lot later. He watches the tragedy in the family of Dr. Strong, whose young wife is tied by the bond of youthful love with her cousin. He learns about the disgusting plans of the villain Uriah Gipa, who completely subjugated Agnes's father and dreams of extending his power to her. He is present at the death of Barkis, the husband of the faithful old Pegotti. He penetrates into the secret of the love of the half-insane Miss Dartle for his charming but insidious friend Steerfors. And, finally, he becomes an indirect and unwitting accomplice in the villainous seduction of little Emily Steerfors, whom David himself introduces into the family of a worthy fisherman. The last event leaves a particularly strong imprint on all of David's future worldview. In general, this part of the novel could also be called “Loss of Illusion”. Steerfors, Uriya Gip, life in general - everything takes on a different shade, a shade of reality. Steerfors, who once seemed to David to be the ideal of a young man - brave, beautiful, cheerful, talented - the same Steerfors turns out to be a heartless, calculating villain. Uriah Gip, who appeared to David under the guise of oppression and submission to fate, turns out to be a strong, cunning, ruthless insolent. The adorable little Emily, the "undine" of his childhood, falls prey to the deceiver Steerfors and leaves her home in unrealizable dreams of wealth and nobility. There are no ideals in this part of the novel: the old ones have been destroyed, and the new ones have not yet appeared. This part is a run-up to the next and last: to Dora, to love, to an independent life, to the activity of a writer. Here Dickens again returns to the original, abstract-humanistic principles of his social philosophy. Here he again echoes with the utopian writers of the 18th century, who sought salvation from all social evils in the beautiful individual qualities of a person taken in abstraction and in the equally abstract relations of people to each other.

And precisely because Dickens himself shares with his heroes confidence in the infinite significance of such relations and in the possibility of correcting humanity in this way, he can put into the mouth of Agnes, his ideal heroine, the following words spoken in a moment of bitter life trials: “I hope that true love and truth will ultimately triumph over all evil and sorrow in this world ”[1; 16, p. 349]. The third and final part of "David Copperfield" should bring us very close to what is "now", to the "present day" of the novel, to the life of a writer at a writing desk, busy composing his memoirs. Therefore, the shadows that have gone into the past become more and more shadows. Little Emily's cute shadow disappears without a trace somewhere across the ocean. The story that brings her closer to Mary Barton turns out to be just an episode in her "earthly" existence. By the end of the novel, Emily is once again an “undine,” a fairy-tale girl. This is the case with everyone whom the author leaves outside of "this life", in the past. This is not the case only with Agnes, for Agnes in her real nature - not only a friend, sister and advisor, but also a wife - is revealed only at the end of the novel. Agnes does not belong to the past, but to the present of the author. Therefore, her character in the novel is not fully disclosed. That is why at the end of his novel the author says goodbye to all his heroes and heroines, without saying goodbye to only one - Agnes. Agnes creates a transition and a connecting link between the two elements that we talked about at the beginning: between the hero of the memoirs and the author of the memoirs - between the little boy David Copperfield and the author of the novel, the writer. Agnes is a living result, a living connection, a living reconciliation with the past and its justification. The third part of the novel is the story of an adult. Life begins to appear to David as a forest of difficulty. This is not only the beginning of a new outlook on life, but also the beginning of a growing controversy between Copperfield and Dora, his little "child-wife", to whom the questions of harsh reality seem like a cruel joke of her "bad boy". But it is also a return to autobiography in one narrower sense - to Dickens's autobiography as a writer. It is the financial difficulties of Betsy's grandmother that make David Copperfield become a parliamentary reporter and devote himself to the study of stenography with an iron zeal. And in exactly the same way as it was in the life of Dickens himself, simultaneously with these studies, which have a very distant relationship to literature, Copperfield's first literary experiments appear. Like Dickens himself, he starts with small pieces and then moves on to the novel.

But gradually David Copperfield is gaining fame, and his baby wife proudly holds feathers ready for him while he sits at his desk. His success grows, and he moves on to his first novel. The last part of the novel is dedicated to David Copperfield's love for Dora, his marriage to her and their family life. It is a separate little novel inserted into the fabric of David Copperfield's memoirs. He is so isolated from everything else that his own specific intonation turned out to be necessary for him. The romance with Dora is almost entirely in humorous tones. And this is not only the happiest, but also the only possible design for him. Compared to David's childhood love for the romantic beauty Emily, his love for Dora and Dora herself are not remarkable at all. And at the same time, the story with Dora has its own special charm. Here again the distance that exists between what was happening and the process of narration begins to act. A man who already has a daughter at Dora's age tells about the naive love of young Dora and young David! And so he talks about his follies with a smile and not without sentimental regret. But for the most part in the story of little Dora, the distance between author and hero is emphasized not by sentimental elegiac, but by comic intonation. The apogee of the hero's development is his final confirmation as a writer and his marriage to Agnes. Through Agnes, the author returns to himself, the fusion in a single person of both the author and the hero of the novel. Therefore, the novel ends in the same way as it began - a return to idyll. This is a new idyll, behind which lies years of hard trials and losses, but nevertheless it has been restored, and the author tries to give it as much convincingness as possible, drawing himself at a writing table, in the circle of happy children, next to his happy wife Agnes. Dickens' realism, which for some reason is usually reproached for sentimentality, is piercingly true to life. But it is not a hundred-watt light of worldly wisdom that falls on him, but the rays of a completely different Luminary. Hence everything outlandish, "implausible" in Dickensian characters. It is no coincidence that Chesterton speaks of "the huge fire that Dickens lit". Those who were fortunate enough to love Dickens know how hot - sometimes unbearably hot - the fire of compassion that illuminates his books [20, p. 245]. The same Chesterton owns an ingenious, childishly simple formula in which a huge cultural phenomenon, or rather life, is focused, whose name is Charles Dickens: "Wherever people go, he wants us to be with them, and accept them, and digest" [ 20, p. 305]. As easy as kids do. Conclusions on the first chapter: Dickens's attitude towards children is ambivalent: romantic tenderness and admiration are combined with puritanical rigidity and severity. Dickens saw the "small world" of childhood with his "childish" eyes, in all its little things and details. It was at this time in England that the production of toys was expanding, he English countryside who dreams of an academic career. He travels to the city, which is most alluring to him, but soon has a love affair with Arabella, who is in search of a husband. When Arabella finds out that Jude will not be able to satisfy her material expectations, she leaves him. Jude then enters into a love affair with his cousin Sue, with whom he lives in an extra-marital relationship and has children. Not least on account of his conflicted nature, a series of critical situations occurs that precludes him from entering university. Through Jude’s story Hardy aims to show how social circumstances lead to homelessness, a nomadic existence, unemployment, poverty and ruin. The circumstances of the novel show “that class structure and moral code are not solely affecting the protagonists from without, but they are rather a part of the collective subconscious within the individual” (Schares 2011, 512). The course of the story demonstrates that [a]though there seems to be nothing more desirable to both of them than being together, there are always events preventing this – up to the tragic ending. Why this has to be, the novel refuses a definite answer, but there is far more to it than foreshadowings of dark hereditary family pathology. The novel reaches deeply into the psychology of its protagonists and offers various explanations and hints. (Schares 2001, 512) The question is whether social circumstances are truly the main reason why the dream of a young person cannot be realized. In this case, does the main reason not lie in the contradictory character of the protagonist himself, in the rash decisions and in the lack of purity such as that one sees in the character of Oliver Twist? If Jude did not have the fortune that Oliver Twist did, namely, of finding a rescuer who acts out of pure love, and a reliable advisor, it cannot be merely the result of social circumstances, but also of his inner strength in terms of achieving a stable life. The American writer Mark Twain (1835–1910), in his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884, 1885), describes the adventures of the boy Huckleberry Finn, who became an orphan when his mother died and his father left him. He was adopted by the Widow Douglas. Throughout the work, the motif of the intense loneliness of an abandoned boy is repeated. Twain’s next novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), has Tom as the main character: The major character is Tom, who stands for the resourceful, clever, and courageous American adolescent who loves to break rules, face the unknown, and give full play to his impulses. Accompanied by Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and Becky Thatcher, he has to confront Injun Joe, who, in the end, is trapped in a cave and dies. Tom is supported by his generous aunt Polly and the towns people. (Sorop 2011, 1085) Acta_Neophilologica_2017_FINAL.indd 103 13.11.2017 10:14:57 104 Irena Avsenik Nabergoj In both works the author describes the adventures of an abandoned child by highlighting the child’s innocence. The child acquires life experience through situations that he does not choose himself, though each child also encounters people who show compassion and mercy. William Faulkner’s (1897–1962) novel Light in August (1932) is the story of Joe Christmas and his life path, on which he encounters both cruelty and understanding. His mother dies during childbirth, and with her death the child is struck by the cruel path of homelessness. When his grandfather Eupheus found out years before that his daughter had run away with a man and become pregnant, he did not want her to keep the baby. Thus, after the daughter’s death in childbirth, he took the boy to the door of an orphanage, leaving him there on Christmas day (hence the name Christmas). Joe Christmas experiences a difficult life path of social isolation, which is made all the more so difficult because he is of mixed race. How cruel racial discrimination in the American society of his time was is shown when the white woman Joanna Burden was allegedly murdered because she did not cohort with white people but with black people. According to the judgement of the people, only a black man could have committed this murder. Parallel to Joe Christmas’s story is that of the poor girl Lena Grove, whose parents died when she was twelve years old. She was rejected by her acquaintances after she became pregnant, though unmarried, and when the father, Lucas Burch, left her; however, others are merciful towards her in her time of distress The story of the novel Oliver Twist depicts the harrowing life story of the eponymous boy of unknown birth whose identity is not revealed until near the end of the narrative. After the boy’s mother dies in childbirth, Oliver is sent to a miserable orphanage, where he is often beaten.

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Dickens Ch. A Christmas Carol // Collected works: In 30 volumes. Vol. 12. M .: Fiction. 1959. S. 5-101.

Dickens Ch. Cricket behind the hearth // Sobr. cit .: In 30 volumes. Vol. 12. M.: Fiction, 1959.S. 193-295.