Charles dickens and oliver twist

The aim of the work: - Determine the place of creativity of Charles Dickens in English and world realistic literature; - Compare the realistic method in the novels "The Adventure of Oliver Twist" and "Great Expectations", comparing plot and compositional features, images of the main characters and secondary characters; - Analyze the development of Dickens' social philosophy on the example of these works - Identify the main features of Dickens' style in early and late works.
When solving the tasks set, methods of analysis and comparison of works of art are used.
1. The place of Dickens' creativity in the development of English and world realistic literature
Dickens opens a new stage in the history of English realism. It is preceded by the ­attainment of eighteenth-century realism and half a century of Western European romance. Like Balzac, Dickens combined the virtues of both styles in his work. Dickens himself lists Cervantes, Lesage , Fielding and Smollet as his favorite writers. But it is characteristic that he adds " ­Arabic Tales" to this list.
To some extent, in the initial period of his work ­, Dickens repeats the stages of development of English realism in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The origins of this realism are Steele and Addison's Moral Weeklies . On the eve of the big novel there is a moralistic ­essay. The conquest of reality, which takes place in the literature of the 18th century, takes place first in genres approaching journalism. Here the accumulation of vital material takes place, new social types are established, which the realistic social novel will use as a kind of starting point for a long time.
The realistic novel of the 18th century arises from the literature of everyday life . This attempt to generalize and systematize the materials of reality is especially characteristic of the ideology of the third estate, which sought ­to comprehend and order the world with the power of its thought.³
The writers of the realistic novel of the nineteenth century, among whom Dickens occupies one of the first places, begin by destroying this tradition which they have inherited ­. Dickens, whose characters in some of their features show a significant resemblance to the characters of Fielding or Smollet (for example, it has been repeatedly pointed ­out that Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chasseluit are more or less close copies of Tom Jones), makes a significant reform in this type of novel. Dickens lives in an epoch of open ­internal contradictions of bourgeois society. Therefore, following the moral-utopian construction of the 18th century novel is replaced in Dickens by a deeper insight into the essence of bourgeois reality, a more organic plot following its contradictions. The plot of Dickensian novels in the first period of his work (after the " Pickwick Club"), however, also has a family character (happy ending of the ­love of heroes, etc. in " Nicholas Nickleby " or "Martin Chasseluit "). But in fact, this plot is often relegated to the background and becomes a form ­that holds the narrative together, because it constantly explodes from the inside with more general and more directly expressed social problems (raising children, workhouses, oppression of the poor, etc.), not fit within the narrow framework of the "family genre". The reality included in Dickens' novel is enriched with new themes and new material. The horizon of the novel is clearly expanding.
And further: the utopia of a "happy life" in Dickens only in a few cases (like "Nicholas Nickle ­bi ") finds a place for itself within the bourgeois world. Here Dickens, as it were, seeks to get away from the real practice ­of bourgeois society. In this respect he, despite his dissimilarity with the great romantic poets of England (Byron, Shelley), is in some way their heir. True, his very quest for a "beautiful life" is directed in a different direction than theirs; but the pathos of rejecting bourgeois practice connects ­Dickens with romanticism.
The new era taught Dickens to see the world in its ­inconsistency, moreover, in the insolubility of its contradictions. The contradictions of reality gradually become the basis of the plot and the main problem of Dickensian novels. This is especially clearly felt in later novels, where the "family" plot and "happy ending" openly give way to the leading role of a wide range of socio-realistic picture. Such novels as "Bleak House", "Hard Times" or "Little Dorrit" pose and resolve, first of all, the social question and the life contradictions associated with it, and only secondly, any family-moral conflict.
But the works of Dickens differ from the previous ­realistic literature not only in this strengthening of the realistic social moment. The attitude of the writer to the reality he depicts is decisive. Dickens has a profoundly negative attitude towards bourgeois reality.
A deep awareness of the internal gap between the world desired and the world that exists is behind ­Dickensian predilection for playing with contrasts and romantic mood swings - from harmless humor to sentimental pathos, from pathos to irony, from irony back to realistic description.
In the later stage of Dickensian writing, these superficially romantic trappings for the most part disappear or take on a different, more gloomy ­character. However, the concept of "another world", a beautiful world, albeit not so picturesquely decorated, but still clearly opposed to the practice of bourgeois society, is preserved here as well.
This utopia, however, is for Dickens only a secondary moment, not only demanding, but directly suggesting a full-blooded depiction of real life with all its catastrophic injustice.⁴
However, like the best realist writers of his time, whose interests went deeper than the outer ­side of phenomena, Dickens was not content with simply stating the randomness, "accident" and injustice of modern life and yearning for an obscure ideal. He inevitably approached the question of the internal laws of this chaos, of those social laws that nevertheless govern it.
Only such writers deserve the title of ­true realists of the 19th century, with the courage of real artists mastering new life material.
The realism and "romance" of Dickens, the elegiac, humorous ­and satirical stream in his work are in direct connection with this progressive movement of his creative thought. And if the early works of Dickens are still largely “decomposable” into these constituent elements (“Nicholas Nickleby ”, “The Antiquities Shop”), then in his further development Dickens comes to a certain synthesis in which all previously separately existing aspects of his work are ­subordinated to a single task - with the greatest completeness "to reflect the basic laws of modern life" ("Bleak House", "Little Dorrit").
This is how the development of Dickensian ­realism should be understood. It's not that Dickens' later novels are less " fabulous ", less "fantastic". But the fact is that in the later novels the "fairy tale", and "romance", and sentimentality, and, finally, the actual realistic plan of the work - all this as a whole has come much closer to the task of a deeper, more ­essential reflection of the basic laws and basic conflicts in society.
Dickens is a writer by whose works we can judge, and quite accurately, about the ­social life of England in the middle of the 19th century. And not only about the official life of England and its history, not only about the parliamentary struggle and the labor movement, but also about small details, as if not included in the “big story”. From the novels of Dickens, we can judge the state of railways and water transport in his time, the nature of the exchange operations in the City of London, prisons, hospitals and theaters, markets and places of entertainment, not to mention all types of restaurants, taverns, hotels of the old England. The works of Dickens, like all the great realists of his ­generation, are, as it were, an encyclopedia of his time: different ­classes, characters, ages; the lives of the rich and the poor; figures of a doctor, a lawyer, an actor, a representative of the aristocracy and a man with no specific occupation, a poor seamstress and a secular young lady, a manufacturer and a worker - such is the world of Dickens' novels.
“It is clear from all the works of Dickens,” A.N. wrote about him. Ostrovsky, - that he knows his fatherland well, studied it in detail and thoroughly. In order to be a folk writer, love for one's homeland is not enough - love gives only energy, feeling, but does not give content; you still need to know your people well ­, get along with them shorter, become related.