ПОЗНАВАТЕЛЬНОЕ

Оси и плоскости тела человека - Тело человека состоит из определенных топографических частей и участков, в которых расположены органы, мышцы, сосуды, нервы и т.д.

Отёска стен и прирубка косяков - Когда на доме не достаёт окон и дверей, красивое высокое крыльцо ещё только в воображении, приходится подниматься с улицы в дом по трапу.

Дифференциальные уравнения второго порядка (модель рынка с прогнозируемыми ценами) - В простых моделях рынка спрос и предложение обычно полагают зависящими только от текущей цены на товар.

Charles Dickens’s Literary Work

CRITICAL REALISM

The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and at the beginning of the fifties. The critical realists set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society, exposing the crying social contradictions. Their strong point was their true reflection of life and their sharp criticism of existing injustice.

The merit of English realism lies in its humanism — its sympathy for the working people. The greatest English realist of the time was Charles Dickens. With striking force and truthfulness he described the sufferings of common people.

Another critical realist was William Makepeace Thackeray. His novels mainly contain a satirical portrayal of the upper strata of society. Here belong, of course, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot. These writers showed a realistic picture of their contemporary England.

All these novelists portrayed everyday life, with a little man as the — central character.

Charles Dickens (1812—1870)

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on the 7th of February, 1812. He was the second child and the eldest son of John and Elizabeth Dickens. John Dickens was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office (казначейство военно-морского флота).

After a short period in London, John Dickens in 1817 was transferred to the dockyard at Chatham, and here the family remained until 1822. These were the happiest years of Charles Dickens’s childhood and youth. Here Dickens went to a small day-school. He also learnt much from his mother, who was a well-educated woman, and from the books she gave him to read.

It was here, years later, when he was at the height of his fame, that he returned to live, buying Gad’s Hill place, the very house that he and his father had so often admired when out walking.

The little boy, eager, bright, sensitive, energetic but not really robust, found life opening out for him wonderfully during these years at Chatham.

His recollections of these golden years of his childhood played a very important part in his work. If he had not had this happy time, brightening his childhood; the novels of Dickens would have been darker.

When Charles was about ten, the family left Chatham as John Dickens had been recalled to London. John Dickens had left Chatham in debt, even after selling off some of his furniture, and nobody in London came to the rescue of John and Elizabeth Dickens and their six children. Everything that could be was given to the pawnshop, and young Charles was often sent on errands of this sort, for he was no longer going to school. He had done well at school in Chatham. But his parents had made no plans for him to continue his education in London.

A friend of the family helped Charles find work at a blacking warehouse. Charles had to paste labels on the jars of blacking. He received six shillings a week.

Only a few days after Charles started work at the blacking warehouse, his father was arrested and sent to the debtors’ prison. John Dickens was a happy-go-lucky, irresponsible man, and he usually spent more than he earned. As a result of such living he was thrown into the debtors' prison. Later, Mrs Dickens and the younger children joined him. Little Charles did not live in the prison. He had to live in miserable lodgings and to feed himself.

It came to an end when a relative of the family left Mr Dickens a legacy which was enough to pay his debts and leave the prison. When his father was set free, Charles was sent to a private school where he remained for three years. He was fifteen when his education ended, and he was sent again to earn his living this time as a clerk in a lawyer’s office in London. All his spare time he spent in learning shorthand and visiting the British Museum Library filling up the gaps in his education by reading.

Just before his seventeenth birthday Charles became a reporter. Soon he was recognized to be one of the best reporters in the whole country. He was invited to join several papers. When he was nineteen he was able to do some reporting in the House of Commons for newspapers. Finally in 1834 he became the star reporter on the Morning Chronicle.

Young Dickens, with his restless energy and illimitable curiosity, went everywhere and noticed everything. His power of observation and memory were phenomenal.

He went all over the country getting news, writing up stories, meeting people and using his eyes. These early days of a reporter made very deep impressions on his mind and provided him with material for his books.

Charles Dickens’s Literary Work

Charles Dickens began his literary career in 1833. He wrote some sketches under the title Sketches by Boz. Boz was his pen-name. It was a nickname of his younger brother. The work was warmly received, but it was in 1836 that Charles Dickens rose to fame with the publication of The Pickwick Papers. A new firm of publishers, Chapman and Hall, asked Dickens to write some sort of humorous text, describing sporting misadventures, to support the drawings made by a popular comic artist called Seymour. Dickens agreed, but only on his own terms. These were that the drawings must illustrate the text, not the text the drawings.

The first instalment of Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (the full title of the book) brought the author world-wide fame. The bookis a humorous description of funny adventures and misadventures of the members of the Pickwick Club which was founded by Mr Pickwick, a rich old gentleman, who had retired from business. The purpose of the club, according to its members, was "for the observations of character and manners". All the members, like Mr Pickwick, are rather well-to-do; they spend their time in travelling and in looking for mild adventures.

Long before the twentieth and last number of the paper with The Pickwick Papers came out, the country was Pickwick-mad. The name was given to all manner of things, from coats and hats to canes and cigars.

Dickens became famous all over the world, especially in America and in Russia. Encouraged by his success Dickens set to work as a novelist. His next novel Oliver Twist (1838) deals with social problems. It is the story of a little boy born in a workhouse and left an orphan. The kind and honest boy by nature finds himself in the environment of thieves and lives through terrible hardships. As Dickens believes in the inevitable triumph of good over evil, it is only natural, therefore, that Oliver Twist overcomes all difficulties. The novel ends happily which has become a characteristic feature of the greater part of Dickens's works.

With Oliver Twist still in hand, Dickens began to work on his next novel Nicholas Nickleby (1839). The book deals with another burning question of the day — that of the education of the children in English private schools.

Nicholas Nickleby becomes a teacher of a typical English boarding-school for children of parents of modest means. There is no question of real education at the "school". Its half-starved pupils are used by the master of the school and his wife for domestic work. Its master, Mr Squeers, is very cruel to the children and his only aim in life is to have as much profit as possible out of his establishment. The scenes of the children's life were so realistic and true to life that a school reform was carried out in England after the publication of the novel.

Dickens's next novel was The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). It is a story of the sufferings and hardships of an old man named Trent, and his granddaughter, Nell, who live in London.

Dickens's first historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841) was published before his visit to America in the autumn of 1841. There were many good reasons for going to America. He wanted to lecture on his works as he knew he would have a large admiring public there. Besides, he wanted to meet some American writers, especially Washington Irving, with whom he had exchanged enthusiastic letters.

After his return from America Dickens wrote American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) which created a sensation in America. They were social satires of the American way of life.

Between 1843 and 1848 Dickens published his A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth. In 1846 he visited Switzerland and Italy. There he began Dombey and Son (1848).

In the fifties and sixties the most profound novels were written — David Copperfield (1850), Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and others.

David Copperfield is mainly an autobiographical novel. In the character of David Copperfield, Dickens shows many features of his own life. The hero of the novel is a young man who lives through hardships and injustice but in the end achieves well-being.

With A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Dickens returned to the historical novel. It is devoted to the events of the French Revolution of 1789-1794.

The beginning of the sixties saw the publication of Great Expectations (1860-1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1864- 1865).

Dickens died in 1870, leaving his last work The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.

From 1858 to 1868 Dickens gave dramatic readings of his novels in England and America. He was a brilliant reader of his novels, but he overworked and died at the age of fifty-eight. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Charles Dickens was one of the greatest novelists that ever put pen to paper.

His novels are now translated into most languages and are highly valued for their realism, their humour and their just criticism of English life.

William Thackeray (1811-1863)

William Makepeace Thackeray was the second representative of critical realism in English literature of the 19^th century. Dickens and Thackeray were such near contemporaries that their work was often compared, but Thackeray's life was different from that of Charles Dickens.

William Makepeace Thackeray was born into a prosperous middle class family. His father was a well-to-do English official in Calcutta, India, where he was born. When his father died, the boy, aged six, was sent to England where he attended the famous Charterhouse School. In 1828 Thackeray entered Cambridge University. While a student, he was clever at drawing cartoons and writing verses, chiefly parodies. He did not stay long at the University. The stagnant atmosphere of the place suffocated him.

Besides, his wish was to become an artist, and therefore he left the University without graduating and went to Germany, Italy and France to study art.

Caricature of Thackeray drawn by himself

Intending to complete his education, Thackeray returned to London and began a law course in 1833. Meanwhile, the Indian bank in which the money Thackeray inherited from his father was invested went bankrupt, and Thackeray was left penniless. Thus, he was obliged to drop the studies to earn his living. For a long time he hesitated about whether to take up art or literature as a profession. At last he decided to try his hand as a journalist. He wrote humorous articles, essays, reviews and short stories which he sent to London magazines. He illustrated his works with amusing drawings.

The first book which attracted attention was The Book of Snobs (1847), which deals with the upper classes and their followers in the middle classes, whose vices the author criticizes with the sharp pen of satire. The book draws a gallery of English snobs of different circles of English society. In Thackeray's view a snob is a person who bows down to and flatters his social superior and looks down with contempt on his social inferiors. In his book the author declares war against snobbery, vanity and selfishness.

It was followed by Vanity Fair (A Novel without a Hero) — the peak of social realism, which brought great fame to the novelist, and remains his most-read work up to the present day. It appeared first in twenty-four monthly instalments which Thackeray illustrated himself, and then in 1848, as a complete book.

The novels of the later period, The History of Pendennis (1850) and The Newcomes (1855) are realistic, but they show the gradual reconciliation of the author with reality.

In the other novels, Henry Esmond (1852), and The Virginians (1859) Thackeray turned to historical themes, showing a remarkable knowledge of history.

Thackeray's last novel, Denis Duval, remained unfinished, for Thackeray died in 1863.

Numerous other works written by Thackeray include essays, short stories, sketches, satirical poems. These were popular during the writer's life-time but, for the most part, forgotten by the next generation of readers.

Thackeray is at bottom a satirist. In his novels he gives a vivid description of the upper classes of society, their mode of life, manners and tastes. His knowledge of human nature is broad. His criticism is acute, his satire is sharp and bitter. Thackeray used to say that he wished to describe men and women as they really are.

Thackeray's books are often very sad. He tells us clearly that not only people are often wicked, vain and unjust, but that they can be only what they are due to existing conditions. As Thackeray had no hope of change, many of the pages he wrote are filled with sorrow for the world's ills.

The picture of the life of the ruling classes of England created by Thackeray remains a classic example of social satire to this very day.

The Bronte Sisters

There were three Brontes — novelists: Charlotte (1816 — 1855), Emily (1818- 1848) and Anne (1820- 1849). Their father was an Irish protestant, a clergyman in Yorkshire. Their mother died when the girls were little. The children were entirely devoted to reading, writing, drawing, wandering over the open moors and playing a game of storytelling about their imaginary heroes. The sisters received their education at a charity school and worked as governesses. Private teaching was the only profession open to educated women, and the Brontes needed to earn their living.

Their life was hard, and they tried to create a new world of their imagination. The sisters turned to literature though they knew of the difficulties a woman writer had to face when it came to publication. Their first volume of verse was published under a masculine pseudonym. Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell (1846).

Charlotte Bronte

Charlotte Bronte's first attempt at prose writing, the novel The Professor (1847) was rejected by publishers. But the young author was not discouraged and began her next novel Jane Eyre (1847) which brought her fame and placed her in the rank of the foremost English realistic writers.

She was personally acquainted with Dickens and Thackeray, and the latter greatly influenced her literary method.

In 1849 Charlotte Bronte published Shirley. The novel dealt with the life of workers at the time of the Luddites' movement.

The author's sympathies are with the working people. The last novel by Charlotte Bronte, Vilette, which came out in 1853, is a realistic description of her experiences at a boarding-school in Brussels.

In her novels Charlotte Bronte combined scenes from her own life with the far richer and more romantic experiences which she imagined. She aimed to make her novels a realistic picture of society but she also added to her realism elements of romanticism. The main subject of her books is the soul of a woman, a governess or a teacher. Her heroines are generous, intelligent, modest and gentle. Charlotte Bronte attacks the greed and lack of culture of the bourgeoisie and sympathises with the workers and peasants. She is convinced that society can be reformed by means of education.

Emily Bronte

Emily Bronte wrote only one novel Wuthering Heights — her prose-poem. This book is regarded as one of the most remarkable novels in English literature.

It is a novel of passion, an early psychological novel. The central characters, Cathy and Heathcliff live out their passion in the windy, rough countryside of Yorkshire, and the landscape is as wild as their relationship. The novel is very original in the way it is written, moving backward and forward in time, and in and out of the minds of the characters. Again it presents a new view of women and their emotions.

The book is strange. On the one hand the plot is full of mystery. On the other hand the novel is very concrete: the time of the action, the landscape, geography and climate are realistic. The author of the book makes no difference between the supernatural and natural. Both work together to serve her artistic purpose. The mystery and the supernatural are used as romantic elements in her original study of violent characters.

Emily Bronte's characters and actions may seem unbelievable but they convince us. They are unique, and their violent emotions are connected with the Yorkshire moors where the action takes place. The moors are varying to suit the changing moods of the story, and they are beautifully described in all seasons.

Emily Bronte very skillfully shows the reader her heroes' psychology and moral conflicts, their desires, passions, temperaments and human weaknesses.

Anne Bronte

The youngest Bronte sister, Anne, wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) also with an unusual central female character and involving complex relationships and problems.

All three Bronte sisters faced these kinds of problems into the novel with unusual courage and directness, and together they changed the way the novel could present women characters: after the Brontes, female characters were more realistic, less idealized and their struggles became the subject of a great many novels later in the nineteenth century.