He was one of the first to offer an unflinching look at the underclass and the poverty stricken in Victorian London. His father had little skill in financial management and this eventually put him and all of his family in a debtors' prison for six months.
The young Dickens worked in a cousin's shop, pasting labels on blacking bottles for six shillings a week. After he became famous, Dickens helped popularise the term "red tape" to describe the bureaucracy in positions of power that particularly hurt the weak and poor. In , when president of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers wanted to talk about the deprivation in some areas, it was not described as terrible or horrific but as "life mirroring the times of Dickens".
This less than perfect England was described by other authors like Benjamin Disraeli and Mrs Gaskell but it is Dickens's view that has really resonated through the ages. Dickens's live readings were said to be filled with humour and performance, with Dickens himself taking on the accents and mannerisms of the characters he was portraying.
And it is the way the characters speak that often brings a smile from the reader. The extraordinary thing he does introduce to the novel is the comic potential of the way people talk. And some in the industry think that Dickens has done even more for the current crop of comedians.
Much comedy today is conditioned by the way Dickens wrote it in the 19th Century and comedy writers today owe a huge debt to him. In reality, we don't finish our sentences and we all interrupt each other. While everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Miss Piggy has taken a role in a film adaptation of Dickens's work, many argue that he was as instrumental in creating the conventions of cinema as he was for inspiring the content itself.
Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein said that important aspects of cinema were created by the influence of Dickens on pioneering film director DW Griffith. He argued that Dickens invented, among other things, the parallel montage - where two stories run alongside each other - and the close-up. The BFI says that there were around versions of Dickens's work recreated in film in the silent era alone. And those adaptations continue to this day. This is in large part because of the visual way Dickens wrote, creating painstaking depictions of places.
These include Broadway's "Nicholas Nickleby" and the Goodman Theatre's annual "A Christmas Carol," as well as small- and big-screen versions of almost all his novels, the recent excellent "Masterpiece Classic" interpretations of "Bleak House" and "Little Dorrit" among them. Fiennes also stars as Dickens himself in the upcoming "The Invisible Woman," about the middle-aged author's affair with the scandalously young actress Nelly Ternan. But the influence of The Inimitable, as Dickens sometimes referred to himself with characteristic immodesty though not, as it happens, strict accuracy , extends well beyond his stories.
Today, Dickens' legacy is still legible in the work of contemporary novelists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Interviewing authors for Printers Row Journal and other publications, I've been struck by how frequently and prominently Dickens figures in discussions of their literary lineage. Many contemporary novelists encountered Dickens at an early age, stumbling upon complete sets of his novels such as the cheap but sturdy Cleartype Edition of , which claims pride of place on my own bookshelves.
Writers as different as Martin Amis and Chicago's Scott Turow have spoken to me of the tidal pull of Dickens on their imaginations; so, more recently, have Elizabeth Gilbert and Donna Tartt, whose current best-sellers "The Signature of All Things" and "The Goldfinch," respectively display their Dickensian affinities like badges of honor.
Dickens often has these very exuberant narrators, who convey the sense that 'Not only do I know what I'm doing, and we're going to go on an adventure — it's going to be a terrific adventure. But echoes of his avuncular, confiding voice are audible throughout. In her more formally composed, one might even say Dickensian way, Tartt was even more effusive.
He's got great intelligence but also has great heart. He's unruly, predictable, chaotic, exciting. And in that sense he's inexhaustibly new and inspiring, like Shakespeare. His worlds are big and all-encompassing; he always has something new and surprising to tell us.
Tartt's authorial voice in "The Goldfinch" is not much beholden to her literary patriarch, but there are whiffs of his characters' distinctive locutions. Consider, for example, the droll speech patterns of Mr. Barbour, the absently solicitous, somewhat dotty Manhattanite whose family takes in the story's young hero, Theo Decker, after the boy's mother dies in a terrorist bombing at a museum. His pale gaze darted around the room, and then returned to me. If you should want such a thing.
Which of course you don't," he added hastily, noting my confusion. But his obvious talent for descriptive writing drew the attention of his editor at the Morning Chronicle, who suggested that he start writing vignettes, or sketches, of life around London. Dickens influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky novels in that Dostoevsky felt that Dickens style and vision conveyed a great understanding of spirituality, social reconstruction and morality. He wrote novels based on his perception of the world and the social issues of the everyday life.
Hard Times highlight three social issues as the impact of Industrial Revolution. By presenting the pain of the working class, the horrible condition of the industry city and the failure of Utilitarianism, Dickens criticizes the Industrial Revolution which caused social chaos for England Society.
From a young boy left to fend for himself in a workhouse to the wealthy figure he became through his writing successes, he knew what it was like to be seen in different lights. This deep understanding of his characters gave his fictional stories the strong element of believability that is needed in a good novel.
Like many others, he began his literary career as a journalist. Then in he became parliamentary journalist for The Morning Chronicle.
Despite this, he was an original writer. The facts of his life while he was growing up or his environments at any time influenced his works.
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