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Charles Dickens
Life Time
7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870
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English novelist. From childhood he learned the horrors of poverty, the order of debt prisons, one of which was his bankrupt father, the harsh everyday life of a bottle washer in a vacsi factory, a copyist of papers in an office, etc. He began as a reporter, established himself as a master of humorous sketch of life and morals, "genre pictures". The grand success of the Pickwick Club (1837), a book that grew out of such genre sketches, predetermined the future of Dickens as the creator of a cycle
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English novelist. From childhood he learned the horrors of poverty, the order of debt prisons, one of which was his bankrupt father, the harsh everyday life of a bottle washer in a vacsi factory, a copyist of papers in an office, etc. He began as a reporter, established himself as a master of humorous sketch of life and morals, "genre pictures". The grand success of the Pickwick Club (1837), a book that grew out of such genre sketches, predetermined the future of Dickens as the creator of a cycle of novels that form a kind of panorama of English life of the Victorian era, unique in the richness of observations and diversity of human types, - "Oliver Twist" (1839), "The Antiquities Shop" (1841), "Dombie and the Son" (1848), undisguised autobiography and other books in this period (1843);
The idea of Dickens as an artist who achieved maximum life-similarity was refuted by the most astute critics of the XIX century, in particular, J.K. Ruskin, who felt the bright theatricality of this prose ("He liked to create, as if being in the circus arena surrounded by flaming torches"). Equally arbitrary was the staunch view of Dickens’ conformism, who was supposedly afraid to incur the wrath of a Victorian audience. J. Orwell noted, therefore, that "in its attitude to Dickens, the English public has always resembled an elephant who is beaten with a stack, and it gives him pleasure, as if scratching his trunk."