Charles Dickens (1812-1870), one of Britain's greatest novelists, whose representative works include Orphans of the Mist, Great Prospects, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and so on.
Covers of some of Dickens's works.
Dickens meets Ellen Poe.
Dickens (1812-1870) was one of the greatest novelists in the history of English and world literature. Although he only lived to be 58 years old, he left behind 15 novels, more than 20 novellas, hundreds of short stories, and created more than two thousand memorable characters, making him one of the most prolific writers in the world. In the literary world, Dickens's love was unprecedented. He was the Queen and The Prince of Wales' favorite novelist, had his readers in every village and town in the British Isles, and created characters who traveled to the United States, Australia, Canada, Russia, China, and Japan. In the English-speaking world, his work is a must-read list, from primary and secondary school reading lists to university courses. In Britain, Dickens's head was printed on stamps and banknotes and became a cultural symbol of the Anglo-Saxon nation. People often compare Dickens with Shakespeare, Shakespeare mainly composed plays and poetry, theatrical performance is limited by the stage space, the audience is relatively limited, on the influence of the people, Shakespeare is far inferior to Dickens. Dickens' popularity around the world is a striking literary phenomenon.
1 "Literary London"
Capture the landscape of waves of industrialization and urbanization
Dickens left Chatham with his family for the city of London at the age of 9, and at the age of 11 his father was imprisoned in the Marshalthis debtors' prison for debt. To save money, both the mother and siblings moved into prison to live with their father. Dickens was forced to work as a child laborer at the Warren Black Shoe Polish Workshop on the Thames Riverfront, where he covered and labeled shoe polish bottles. Because Dickens was handsome and very skilled, he was arranged by the foreman to work in public in front of the window and perform demonstrations. Although Dickens's child labor career lasted only about half a year, the impact on his life was fundamental: in the heart of his childhood Dickens caused a strong sense of abandonment, becoming a lifelong shame and bitter memories, so that Dickens indulged in the streets from an early age, and his footprints traveled through the streets of London, so that the streets became his home.
Dickens was an authentic "Londoner", who constructed victorian urban London into a unique literary space through his own literary imagination on the basis of careful observation, and created "Literary London", which is his most personal literary achievement. His work not only relies on London as the environment of the plot and characters, but also on London as the center of the novel, which is the generator of the plot and the determinant of the landscape and the environment. On the one hand, Dickens made a comprehensive depiction of London; on the other hand, the complex life of the London city, the streets and crowds of London are the inspiration for his creation. Because Dickens was familiar with the details of London, he wrote the true meaning of London, presented the most striking phenomenon of London - the mixture, diversity and transience of urban experience, and took the lead in using novels to capture the fleeting landscape in the wave of industrialization and urbanization, as well as the confusion and confusion that people arose from, although they lived in the city, they felt indifferent and lonely.
Dickens began by gazing at life in London, from which he created the modernity of the London metropolis, in which wanderers and garbage pickers are the subjects of modernity on the streets of London. As an experiencer and expressor of urban experience, Dickens was born a wanderer, and he created numerous images of wanderers. In Oliver Retreat, the abandoned child Oliver wanders the streets of London at midnight, and in "Christmas Song", the ghost leads Scrooge through the streets of London. "This Road Doesn't Work" recounts Dickens's revisiting of his childhood lost scene. In addition, "Literary London" has a large number of garbage pickers, such as Crook, the owner of the scrap shop in "Desolate Hills", who rummages through old legal documents all day long, trying to find something that can make him rich. He lives off the courtroom's scrap paper, and on the verge of death, he discovers that blackmail is promising speculation, but shockingly, Crook eventually spontaneously combusts. In "Our Mutual Friends", there are both "garbage pickers" among the vulnerable, such as the old man Hexam and Hurai Ryder Hood who salvaged the body in the Thames; there are also "garbage pickers" in high society, such as Fleigiebe, the owner of the business that bought stocks, and Mr. Winelin, an upstart in the market speculation. Garbage pickers hang out lonely on the city streets as they sleep with their heads bowed, carrying plastic bags. The garbage pickers in the spiritual realm are very similar to this. Dickens was keen to wander the streets of London, and with his own observations and thoughts, he incorporated the whole of London into his symbolic framework, thus turning himself into a "garbage picker".
London is a consistent theme in Dickens's work, almost equivalent to Dickens, so that Dickens became the symbol and epitome of London, we can say "Dickens's Britain", but we can not say "Tennyson's Britain", "Thackeray's Britain", Dickens and London's combination is a unique historical phenomenon that cannot be copied.
2 Children's perspective
Every stone is a book that I read as a child
Dickens's novel narrative chooses a special perspective on his time, the child's perspective. The tragic experiences of childhood took root in its tenacious spiritual fertile soil and sowed the seeds of imagination, and almost every one of his works staged the street experiences of childhood London. In David Copperfield, he recalled, "I came to that quiet street, where every stone was a book I had read as a child. Sam Weller in the first novel, Pickwick, like Dickens, is a street-based child, and after the black shoe polish workshop first appeared in this novel, black shoe polish bottles, black shoe polish brushes, and advertisements on shoe shine boxes recurred in his later novels. In a sense, Dickens's adult imagination and character were forged during this experience in Marciasi prison and the black shoe polish workshop. In Oliver Retreat, Oliver was born in Chatham, the town of Chatham, the birthplace of Dickens's childhood, and the figure of the parish boy wandering around suddenly triggered Dickens's feelings and associations for childhood. Oliver falls into the Fagin Thief's Cave, reenacting the friendship between Dickens Jr. and Bob Fagin in the Black Shoe Polish Workshop; Oliver's struggle to get a decent life, growing from a dirty child to a clean and elegant man, is the condensation of Dickens's struggle. The child figure in Nicholas Nichols began with Dickens's own childhood. David Copperfield, a child laborer in the Moldstone and Grimbies stacks, is exactly the age at which Dickens came to London, a reproduction of his unforgettable painful memories. Dickens's childhood caused him lifelong mental trauma, and he was always able to find a spiritual food in his childhood homeland. "Christmas Song" is a story of redemption. There are two children in the story, one called "Ignorance" and the other "Poor", who are "miserable, annoying, extremely ugly, and very despicable." Dickens's childhood narrative, the protagonist of the story, Scrooge, is ubiquitous in Dickens's childhood experiences, such as the image of a dilapidated building that is a combination of a black shoe polish workshop and Gates Hill.
Dickens used fiction as a tool to help poor, abandoned children. These children, like Dickens of the past, were treated unfairly at the hands of poorly managed schools and indifferent parents, and lived unhappy lives because of the laziness and selfishness of their guardians, so Dickens's goal in life, his determination to activate his will as an artist, was to help the weak and hope that the social order would improve. The narrative of childhood made Dickens a lifelong defender of children.
3 History writing
Find the power to redeem society
For literary creation to evoke deep emotions and broad social influences on the reader, the genius of the writer must be integrated with the traditions of his time. Born in the Victorian era, Dickens blended the British tradition between the rise and fall of Napoleon (i.e., the heroic past) and the era of British imperialism (i.e., a beautiful vision of the future), expressing the tastes of the Victorian middle class while being deeply rooted in the ancient British tradition. Artistically, Dickens inherited the traditional British spirit of humor and moral philosophy; thematically, Dickens's novels have a deep historical consciousness.
Inspired by real life, Dickens set his sights on distant history. His early works express the reverence for historical and cultural traditions, and in Chef Cook's Big Bell, the concept of the "past", the historical events of London are intertwined with Dickens's lost childhood, and while exploring The history of London, he is also looking for his own past, combining the emotions of the past with the years that have passed. In Martin Jushuerwirt, Dickens sets the scene of the novel in Wiltshire, which has a strong historical and cultural atmosphere, and associates the painful experience of Wiltshire's historical enslavement, exploitation and deportation with The United Kingdom as a "great grave", full of anxiety about the crisis of the Survival of the British people. For Dickens, this sense of history expressed a nostalgia for historical traditions, and through understanding history to find the strength to redeem himself and society.
Dickens was a writer with a strong sense of the times, but he also wrote two historical novels. Barnaby Ratchey (1841) judges the morality of history against the historical backdrop of the "Gordon Rebellion," a religious conflict that took place in London in 1780. The main character in the novel is a country fool who controls London for three full days, arbitrarily setting fires and looting, and Dickens shows a deep fear of the fanatical behavior of the mob, viewing the violent riots of the mob as a great explosion of pure criminality, which is triggered by religious madness and greed, and eventually ignited into a raging fire. He blamed the mob's fanaticism on brutal and cruel criminal law and the neglect of education by public authorities, arguing that it was more serious than the crime. In this novel Dickens writes a history of "sudden violence", describing the uprising as an act of arrogance of the "blind masses", whose spontaneous consequences are bound to lead to catastrophe and end in failure, aiming to express his attitude towards the revolution by reproducing this forgotten history, that is, the people's uprising is blind, and the use of revolutionary means to resolve social contradictions will not work.
Dickens's second historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities, takes the French Revolution as its historical background. The Bourgeois Revolution in France at the end of the 18th century had a far-reaching impact on a world scale. He expressed his fear of the outbreak of a revolutionary civil war through historical narratives, and explored the main reasons for the outbreak of the French Revolution: the exclusive privilege of the French aristocracy to dig a grave for himself, "The Marquis of Eufremonte lay leisurely in bed, waited by four uniformed servants to drink chocolate; while countless peasants were starving outside, a tree was growing somewhere in the woods, and the tree would soon be sawn into planks and made into a guillotine.". The entire novel is dominated by the imagery of the "guillotine": the prison cart rumbling back and forth, the bloody axe, and the head rolling into the basket. He even falsely predicted that a revolution would break out in the middle of Victoria.
Although Dickens was an activist, he was outright negative about "revolution". It can be seen that in his heart, there is no desire to smash the old world and reshape the new society. Dickens's attitude to the French Revolution and false predictions suggest that he gained a deeper insight than other writers of his generation into the social contradictions lurking in the stability and prosperity of the mid-Victorian period. He was resolutely opposed to violent revolution, and his only hope was to revise and improve the existing order, only to hope that the evil nobles would be able to reform themselves like Skrutsch. Dickens's attitude towards revolution was, in the final analysis, the inevitable result of the middle-class position.
Dickens's historical novels have insight into the characteristics of the times and express them according to the characteristics of the times, and the tendencies of the works are saturated with a strong view of personal history. His historical novels not only describe historical events, people, environments, etc., but also analyze how history works, the contribution of history to culture and society, what history enlightens us, and how history points the way for society.
4 Literary status and influence
Reject simplistic classification and definition
Dickens is one of the rare great writers in the history of world literature who combines classics with popularity, entertainment and indoctrination, and his ideas and creations, as well as his research and interpretation, are diverse. In the 180 years since Dickens's work came out, his value proposition has not been interrupted, resulting in various "isms" disputes. According to the information available to me, the following situations can be roughly summarized: (1) Dickens was a romantic or idealistic writer. As early as 1859 David Masson declared that Dickens was an "idealist or romantic" novelist and Thackeray was a "realistic novelist." Since then, there has been no shortage of such commentators, with George Scott calling Dickens an "idealist rather than a realist", George Gherson defining Dickens's work as "romantic realism", and Harley Stone calling Dickens a "natural romanticist". (2) Dickens was not a realist, and the main representatives of this view were Joseph Warren Beech, Ernest Baker, George Orwell, Arnold Keitel, Mario Platz, Ransois Bashi, V.S. Pritch, etc. (3) Dickens's work is a combination of sentimentalism and realism, and the representative of this view is Frederick Carr. (4) Dickens was a symbolist, represented by Dorothy van Ghent, Arnold Keitel, Hillis Miller, Garrett Stewart, Edmond Wilson, etc. (5) Dickens was a comedy writer, represented by Jesterton, John Carey, and V.S. Pritcher. (6) John Gross believed that Dickens was an expressionist writer. In short, Dickens's novel is the organic integration of social criticism, humor, farce, melodrama, Gothic novels, mystery novels, detective novels, grotesque techniques, sentimentality and other factors, which can meet the reading expectations of readers at different levels, so it is deeply liked by the public. The pluralistic Dickens rejects simplistic classification and definition.
Dickens's outstanding artistic achievements had a major impact on important writers throughout the world. Edmund Wilson believed, "Dickens was Dostoevsky's master. Because the two famous works "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" benefit greatly from Dickens's depictions of murderers and social rebels. Tolstoy, though rejecting Shakespeare, admired Dickens, and on many occasions expressed unparalleled reverence for the author of David Copperfield. Symbolist pioneer Ellen Poe's famous poem "The Raven" was inspired by Barnaby Lachey, which was influenced by "Bell Music". Kafka, the founder of modernist literature, mentioned Dickens's influence on him many times in his diary, arguing that the Furnace was an uncompromising imitation of Dickens's David Copperfield. In fact, The Trial has traces of the legal metaphor of Bleak House, the Castle reminds the reader of bureaucracy in Little Dooley, and The Metamorphosis hints at david Copperfield's abandoned childhood scenes. James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Vigil and Russian-American writer Nabokov's The Dark Fire have been called "protohypertext", and the hypertext is relational, and literature is understood as a vast network structure, and the "archetypal hypertext" novels of the two are clearly influenced by Dickens.
In the early 20th century, Dickens landed in China by the wind of the late Qing Dynasty and the May Fourth New Culture Movement, and was one of the most familiar foreign literary masters among Chinese readers, and his artistic methods became the object of emulation by many Chinese writers. Lao She lived in England for five years when he was young and was familiar with Dickens's works, whose creations were deeply inspired by Dickens. First of all, Lao She is a famous Beijing writer, and the Beijing flavor in his works has the shadow of Dickens's London flavor; secondly, the humorous style in Lao She's works makes the tragic content have a comedic effect, allowing readers to taste the meaning of tragedy when laughing, and absorbing beneficial nutrients from the works of the humor master Dickens. Zhang Tianyi, who is famous for his satirical novels, is also deeply influenced by Dickens, which is mainly reflected in two aspects, one is the portrayal of ironic and exaggerated characters, and Zhang Tianyi's irony, which integrates political irony, moral irony, cultural irony and human nature irony, and learns Dickens's satirical art. The second is the perspective of children, Zhang Tianyi uses the simple mind of children to examine the complex social reality, revealing the real survival dilemma in a primitive form, which shows the shadow of Dickens's children's perspective.
□ Cai Xi (Professor, School of Literature and Journalism, Xiangtan University)