Dickens’ literary heritage.

Dickens’ literary heritage is of world importance. He developed the English social novel, writing about the most burning social problems of his time. He wrote of the workhouses of England and the tragedy of the children who lived there («Oliver Twist»); he wrote about the problem of education and showed how it crippled children («Nicholas Nickleby»). Dickens wrote about money and its terrible, destructive force over men’s souls («Dombey and Son»). «David Copperfield», one of the most lyrical works of the great novelist, was to some extend autobiographical. Dickens criticized children’s labour, the system of education, but also showed how David triumphed over all these evils, thanks to his humanistic approach to people, to reality.

Dickens’ later novels were «Bleak House» and «Little Dorrit». In «Bleak House» he took up the problem of law and justice; in «Little Dorrit» the reader got acquainted with the debtors’ prison of London. Those novels showed more clearly than before the great social contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the simple people.

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Words Clouds.

Charles Dickens was the most famous writer in the English language during the 19th century, and one of the best-selling authors of all time. He can seem remote from us, as he was born more than 200 years ago. But he  has a lot to tell us today. Throughout his life, he wrote 14 novels and created over 1000 characters.

You can see some of their names in these word clouds. Can you guess the names of the novels?

 

Books by Charles Dickens.

At the International Library Center you can get acquainted with the following books by Charles Dickens:

  • Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. – London : Penguin Books, 1994.

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…’

Those are the famous lines of Dickens’s stirring tale of two cities, London and Paris, at the time of the French Revolution. Suspense gathers from the opening scene, the dramatic coach journey to Dover and the rescue of Dr Manette from incarceration in the Bastille. At the centre of the novel are the figures of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, both men in love with the doctor’s beautiful daughter Lucie, linked together by fate and by the engulfing terrors of revolution.

A Tale of Two Cities was written at a time of crisis in Dickens’s life. It was a wonderful love story and, aside from The Pickwick Papers, the most popular of all Dickens’s novels.

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