Charles Dickens

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Biography of Charles Dickens

Little Dorrit

 Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth on 7 th of February, 1812 into a middle class family of civil servant John Dickens who was an open-hearted and kind man. Charles spent his childhood in the atmosphere of love and friendship, though his mother, Elisabeth, was a snobbish, demanding, rather hard and rather silly.

 The happiest years were between 1817 and 1822, when John Dickens held a good post in the Chatham Dockyard. It was an enchanted time for little Charles.

Biography of Charles Dickens

When Dickens was sixteen he went to London, because his father secured the position of a clerk there. Very soon Charles realized that his happy childhood had been left behind, after his family moved to London in 1822.

• The family lived in poverty. Their household consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Dickens, their five children, a servant and James Larmert, a relative by marriage. Charles schooling came to an end and he had to contribute to the family funds. John Larmert found him a job in a warehouse for several shillings a week.•  Meanwhile, John Dickens was put into Marshalsea Debtors prison for his debts and his family had to follow him into the prison because the debts were great and they had nobody in London to address for money. They had to stay in prison until Mr. Dickens could pay all his debts

• After being released John Dickens decided to take his son away from the warehouse, but his mother didn’t want to lose the money her son was earning. Charles Dickens could never forgive her. When Dickens was fifteen he became a lawyer's clerk. In 1822, having learned shorthand, he secured a full time position in the “Mirror of the Parliament.

• At 25, in 1837, Charles Dickens was already famous. It was a successful period of his life: his first son was born, his family moved out of lodgings into a twelve-room house. During the next six years of writing Charles Dickens observed life and attacked debtors, prisons, schools and workhouses.

• Charles Dickens was a very thoughtful writer. There was a very important element in his work which is above all the others. It is the power of characterisation. Most of the people in his stories are in a sense “types”, they are based on real life people, though he gave them an independent vitality.• In spite of a large family Dickens couldn’t help travelling. Dickens and his household left England for Italy. They came back home in autumn 1845, with the sixth child born abroad.

•He visited Italy and Paris, took and active part in political life of England, started “the Great Expectations”.

•Dickens's love of humanity and the inherent goodness of common man opposed to the egoism of the upper classes makes him a central figure in the literature of England in the 19 th century. Charles Dickens undertook several trips in 1864-1869 to Australia, the USA and Ireland. Afterwards he became ill and died on 9 June 1870. He was buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in London.

Little Dorrit is a serial novel by Charles Dickens published originally between 1855 and 1857. It is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtors' prisons—in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens' other critiques in this particular novel concern the social safety net: industry and the treatment and safety of workers; the bureaucracy of the British Treasury and the separation of people based on the lack of interaction between the classe

Little Dorrit

Principal Characters

Amy Dorrit; The youngest member of the Dorrit family, Amy is a 20-something woman who looks like an adolescent. She lives her life in totally unacknowledged service to her deluded and hapless family. Her main personality trait is utter selflessness.

Arthur Clennam; The 40-year-old son of a cold, harsh woman and a weak man, Arthur struggles to find a place for himself at a seemingly too-late time of life. After learning a few harsh lessons about love and finance, he gets a happy ending.

Characteristics of the characters

•William Dorrit; At first called "The Father of the Marshalsea," Dorrit is the oldest prisoner in the debtor's jail, living on selfish pretensions of former grandeur. After he is discovered to be heir to a huge fortune, Dorrit spends the rest of the novel trying to live up to his own ideas of his very high social status, with mixed success•Mrs. Clennam; A cold and bitter woman, Mrs. Clennam has forced herself to live the life of a reclusive, wheelchair-bound woman as payment for her sins. Her stubborn iron will arguably makes her the novel's most terrifying character.

•Flora Finching and Mr. F's Aunt ; Flora, Arthur Clennam's ex-fiancée, and Mr. F's Aunt, Flora's aunt-in-law, are another great set of paired characters, in the Pet and Tattycoram mold. Sure, at first glance Flora is a woman past her prime who is constantly living in the past and trying to get Arthur to reignite their love affair.•Flintwinch ; Initially Mrs. Clennam's servant, Flintwinch becomes a partner in Clennam & Co. He knows Mrs. Clennam's horrible secrets and uses them to gain power over her and the business.

•Original publicationLittle Dorrit was published in nineteen monthly instalments, each consisting of thirty-two pages and featuring two illustrations by Phiz. Each installment cost a shilling, with the exception of the last, a double issue which cost two shillings.•Adaptations Little Dorrit has been adapted for the screen five times. The first three were produced in 1913, 1920 and 1934. The 1934 German-language adaptation. The fourth, in 1988, is Little Dorrit, a UK feature film starring Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi The fifth adaptation is a TV series. The series aired between October and December 2008 in the U.K. It then aired in America on 2009. The series was broadcast in Australia, on in June and July 2010.

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