A great way to start off the holiday season is by reading the classic tale of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. You might’ve seen adaptations of it in TV shows and movies, but the book has a special magic that will have your imagination running wild. As a Christmas story, this is as good as it gets. The novel is a fable about poverty in London during the early 1800’s, with the infamous Scrooge representing the greed of the rich. I loved the style of narration, the overall message, and how the story presents the festivity of Christmas.
In 1838, Charles Dickens wrote the novel, Oliver Twist which is subtitled The Parish Boy’s Progress. I feel one of Charles Dickens purposes for writing this novel was to realistically portray the widespread poverty and the criminal underworld of London at that time. He uses vivid imagery to describe captivating characters and grim surroundings. I found the realism of the characters intriguing but was confused at times because of the excessive number of characters. Oliver Twist is an orphan that moves from home to home but never seems to adjust.
The husband made a polished oak box, “Twill last all my sewing years!”(415). “I warrant it will. And longer too.”(415). The box was made, “Of poor John Wayward’s coffin, who died of they knew not what.”(415) The unbeknownst ridicule from the husband begins to uncover some truth. “The shingled pattern that seems to cease against your box’s rim continues right on in the piece that’s underground with him.”(415) The irony in this is that the husband obtained the exact wood that was made of his coffin down to every single detail for her sewing box.
He also visits him when he is in hospital, after meeting Voldemort for the first time, after his parents were killed. He tells him about everything what happened, in a way, a father would talk to his son. In addition, Dumbledore gives Harry presents, not directly, but yet this isn’t usual for an ordinary teacher-pupil relationship. He makes it possible that Harry gets a good broom for his first Quidditch game in “The philosopher’s stone”. Gandalf also is interested in Frodo’s and Bilbo’s well-being.
How is character and setting portrayed in chapter 1 of ‘Great Expectations’. The very successful novel “great Expectations” was written during the Victorian ere by Charles Dickens. It was serialized, therefore was written in installments with great deal of cliff hangers and suspense, this was done deliberately by Dickens to make the reader want to continue reading the next episode. Dickens uses a huge amount of description to introduce Pip, a vulnerable little boy with such a naive little heart. Dickens introduces us immediately to Pip, who serves as both the young hero of Great Expectations and the story's narrator looking back on his own story as an adult.
Gilding the Dead: Remembering the Past in Oliver Twist On the first day of class we mentioned that we were reviving the great Charles Dickens; with his name and prestige, I imagined him rising through the floor of the classroom a la Scrooge in a three-piece tweed suit covered in the damp humus of his grave. But to revive an author, in a much less literal sense, is to examine his or her prose while teleporting yourself back to that author’s period. Dickens was not only original for his time, he was revolutionary. I’m no historian of Victorian literature, but it seems to me as if Dickens was the first of his kind. In class, I’ve often claimed that if Shakespeare were Mozart, Dickens could be the Beatles.
Most of his novels are based on the social background of child labour and the gentry, for example 'Oliver Twist'. After reading chapters one and thirty-nine, we can now make comparisons between the two, focusing on areas such as the circumstances of Pip and Magwitch, the settings that the pair meet eachother in, the presentation of the characters ( the changes in Magwich and the changes in Pip ), what we can learn about nineteenth century life from both chapters and finally, the message Dickens includes in each chapter. In chapter one, Pip is an orphaned child and visits the graves of his dead parents "as I never saw my father or my mother" and his brothers "the memory of five little brothers of mine" and this suggests that Pip is rather lonely, in contrast to chapter thirty-nine where he is "three-and-twenty years of age" and lives with his "friend and companion" Herbert Pocket, and is not lonely any more. He is also very wealthy by this chapter as his income since he became of age was a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor. Because Pip is now wealthy and lives in London, he has forgotten his roots and where he came from as a small boy in chapter one; we can tell this from the way he treats Joe Gargery and is ashamed of him when he visits Pip in London.
Being the protagonist of the story, Pip is by far the most important character. But really, there are two Pips in Great Expectations: one as Pip the character, and the other, Pip the narrator who engages in a constant interior monologue of his ruminations as he looks back on his own childhood. This format allows Dickens to write in the intricately descrptive style that he is known for, without facing the problem of the implausibility of young boy speaking with such maturity. Through using this technique, Dickens also manipulates his power over his characters to voice his own opinions on the social climate of the times, especially on the subject of corruption and decay. Consequently, Great Expectations acts not just as novel to entertain, but also as a social historical record from which we can learn.
Young Romance Depicted in “Araby” I chose to write this paper on James Joyce’s “Araby” because I found the narrator’s childlike quest for ideal or fairy-tale love in this short story interesting. Joyce’s dark and gloomy tone at the beginning hints to the reader that this tale is not a typical romance between two young lovers, but more of tragedy. In paragraph two he really sets the dark mood of the story when explaining the priests former house before he died, “The former tenant of our house, a priest, had died in the back drawing-room. Air, musty from having been long enclosed, hung in all the rooms, and the waste paper behind the kitchen was littered with old useless papers” (Joyce 21). As you can see this story is not about young, dreamy love or affection, but about a boy coming to a realization that his idealistic desires for the opposite sex were childish and foolish.
Great Expectations’ Pip: a Bildungsroman Character The bildungsroman genre applies to many prominent literary works by Charles Dickens such as David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations. . Bildungsroman is a German word meaning “development novel”. The term is “applied to a novel that traces the early education of its hero from youth to experience” (Morner and Rausch 22). In his memorable novel Great Expectations Dickens exhibits the coming-of-age of the protagonist Pip, the little orphan, who undergoes emotional, intellectual and social development throughout the novel.