'Differences and Similiraties Between Dickens and Hardy Essay\r'

' the Tempter was born in Portsea, in 12. His let, John ogre, was a kind and likeable man, how eer incompetent with money, and collect to his financial uncontrollableies they moved to Camden when daimon was nine. When Charles was twelve his father was arrested and taken to the debtors’ prison in southwestwardwark. He started work at Warren’s blacking-w atomic number 18house and its strenuous working(a) conditions make an impression on him, deeplyr influencing his fable. He became interested in writing (and acting) and, by and by having learnt stenography in his spargon time, he began working as a freelance reporter at the parliament and the Old Bailey. Under the nom de plume Boz he publish the eponymous Sketches (36), a collection of short pieces concerning capital of the United Kingdom scenes and people. In 36 he married Catherine Hogarth, the distaff child of a fellow editor, to that extent this union proved to be an unhappy one and, though she ca liber him ten children, he decided to separate from her after 22 eld, having f bothence in fill in with an 18-year-old actress, Ellen Ternan. This accompaniment lots constituted a reason of doubt, tribulation and depression for his Victorian frame of mind.\r\nThe Sketches were immediately followed by the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, a globeation in installments which confirmed his triumph as a humourist and satirist. His rise to fame continued with Oliver Twist (38), David Copperfield (49-50), Little Dorrit (57), all influenced by his childhood memories (he purportedly had a near-photographic memory), and his journalistic career. By factor of subtle irony, he denounced the using of children in the slums and factories. His later novels Bleak House (53), severe times (54) and Great Expectations (60-1) revolve around diverse social issues, emphasizing the embarrassing condition of the working class and the poor. byout his life he em finish several newspapers an d magazines, e.g. Household Words or in all The Year Round, which hosted serializations of many prominent novels. His last years were marked by numerous reading tours, flat in America, and the foundation of charities to help the poor. subsequently his goal in 70 his remains were hide in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.\r\nAbove all, Dickens was a storyteller, as he was influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and glasshouse rhymes as substantially up as 18th-century essayists and Gothic novelists. His novels subscribe to been praised †from Tolstoj to Orwell †for their realism and good story planning. On the new(prenominal) hand, Wilde and Virginia Woolf complained of their episodic nature and artificial vein of saccharine sentimentalism. Of course the publication in monthly or weekly installments imposed strict terms, preventing unified plotting and creating force on Dickens to suit the taste of the audience. close to of his novels are set in London, a metropolis he knew well and of which he gave vivid and possible sketches. In Dickens’s first working, his characters are taken from the bourgeoisie, although often satirized, whereas in the latter novels he presents a more radical point of vox populi on society, still without being a subversive thinker.\r\nHis awareness of the increasing spiritual and material decadence as a consequence of industrialization made him more and more critical of society. His mature works managed to draw popular attention to public abuses, devilishs and injustices by means of the juxta spotlights of repellent descriptions of London desolation and umbrage and hilarious sketches of the city. He created caricatures by exaggerating and ridiculing the distinctive social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest classes in their own voices and conversations. His female characters are feeble, and each completely good or irrecoerably evil (a black-and-white honourableity possibl y derived from his difficult relation with his mother). He sympathizes with the poor and the outcast: he shifts the perspective from the upper middle-class world of 18th-century allegory to the life of the lower orders and the working class. Children are often the most relevant characters in his works, a means to fictionally invert the natural order of things, as their equable personality makes them more likely to be the moral t distri simplyivelyers than the pupils of the adults (either into insignificant parents or hypocritical grown-ups), the exempla than the imitators.\r\nHe succeeds not merely in making his readers sympathize with the children, but too in proposing them as models of the correct focus people should behave to one another. His aim lies in teaching a moral lesson to the reader. To accomplish this he uses the most effective language, i.e. a careful filling of adjectives, lexical and syntactical repetitions, juxtapositions of images and ideas and hyperbolic and ironic comments, indeed achieving the most vivid depictions of life and character ever attempted by any novelist. In Coketown, a unreal industrial town, Thomas Gradgrind, an educator unwaveringly believing in facts and figures, has founded a train ground on the suppression of supposition and feelings, the same theories by which he raises his children Louisa and tom. His daughter is compelled to marry Josiah Bo infraby, a ladened banker thrice her age, and she accepts so that her brother can be apprenticed at Bounderby’s bank, nevertheless the man and wife proves to be unhappy.\r\nTom, grown up to be disruptive and self-interested, robs his employer, initially managing to make everyone suspect an honest laborer, Stephen Blackpool , then discove cerise and snuck out of the country by his sister. threatening Times is composed of three admits of three chapters each: Sowing, about the seeds planted by means of the Gradgrind/Bounderby method, Reaping, screening which fruit the plants have borne (Luisa’s unfortunate marriage, Tom’s dishonesty/hedonism which leads to Stephen’s framing) and Garnering, disclosing further details. labored times revolves around the dichotomy in Dickens’s age between the rich and the poor. The work force are forced to work interminable shifts for terrible wages in squalid and dangerous factories, with no hope of improving their living or working conditions due to their lack of education and job skills. Through his characters and stories he denounces this gap, thus criticizing the money-oriented and narrow-minded nature of Utilitarianism, the commonplace approach to stintings in Victorian England, which, harmonise to Dickens was trans molding humans into machines by forbidding the ontogeny of any form of emotion or imagination.\r\nIn fact, Gradgrind indoctrinates the children of the school, as well as his own, into his system of facts, whereas Bounderby considers his laborers cipher mor e than emotionless objects to be exploited at his own liking. Mr. Gradgrind argues that nature is a measurable, quantifiable entity all in all dominated by rational principles, and strives to transform the pupils of his school into little machines unquestioningly following these rules. Dickens’s objective lies in showing how dangerous allowing the â€Å" mechanization” of humans can be, hinting that with no compassion and imagination life would be unendurable. The extract is centered on the description of the Victorian industrial Coketown, a fictitious Northern-English mill-town whose name, the town of coke (coke being a evoke derived from the distillation of coal) is meaningful as it hints at the constituent of industrial pollution to the blackening of buildings. This town is an displeasing place, where everything is a triumph of fact (all fact, workful): it is not further polluted, as demonstrated by â€Å"the unnatural red and black” and the â€Å"river than ran purple with ill-smelling dye”, but also noisy, due to the never-ending â€Å"rattling and trembling” of the steam-engine (one of the symbols of industrialization).\r\nDickens employs metaphors and similes connected with nature, yet they all have blackball and unsettling undertones, as the savage is war-donned, the serpents never-uncoiling, the elephant in â€Å"melancholy foolishness” (i.e. in musth). whence life in Coketown is not only marked by unpleasant monomania as well as by a inherent opposition to the laws of nature and common sense. The social unit place is monotonous as not only the streets are very alike(p) to one another, but also the people, synchronized in all their activities. horizontal public buildings are standardized, looking like factories with â€Å"no taint of fancy” as artistic cheek is contrary to Utilitarianism. Dickens was an important denouncer of the vices and injustices of Victorian England, employing fiction as a means to condemn public evils and abuses. He drew popular attention to the inclemency of some schools, to the squalid misery of London slums and its sad underworld by means of his social/ human-centered novels. He greatly influenced the contemporary reform movement, yet he was not a revolutionary per se, as he never questioned the pre-constituted order of his time, as observe by Orwell.\r\nHe advocated a change not in the whole society but in the single individual, who is the real target of his moral, not policy-making or revolutionary, message. He argued that if men behaved decently, the world would be decent, and made good win over evil in his novels as a sign of his fundamental optimism. Hardy was born of a humble family in Upper Bockhampton , a hamlet in Dorset, in 40. He became apprenticed to a local room decorator at sixteen and then moved to London. He read a lot, including the works of Comte, Mill, Darwin and Schopenhauer, who all influenced his novels, in particu lar Schopenhauer, from whose The World as Will and Idea he adopted the notion of Immanent Will. His first success was Far from the Madding Crowd, published in installments doneout 74. His fame change magnitude even further with a series of sad novels: the Mayor of Casterbridge (86), the Woodlanders (87), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (91) and Jude the Obscure (95). The last book caused an outrage due to its nihilism and immorality: dubbed Jude the repulsive by some, it was publicly burnt by the bishop of Wakefield.\r\nIts controvert reception induced Hardy to turn his efforts altogether to poetry. After his death in 28 his ashes were buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Hardy’s characters are defined through their surroundings. His works are set in Wessex, a semi-fictional county in southern West England corresponding to Dorset based on the eponymous Saxon medieval reign (as stated in the Preface to Far from the Madding Crowd). Being an architect , he had an transcendent sense of place, which allowed him to describe medieval ruins as well as important landmarks like Stonehenge or the college of Oxford. His archaeozoic life in Dorset granted him with an extensive intimacy of the folk traditions connected with country gatherings or fairs. In his novels the rural group assumes a role similar to that of ancient Greek choruses, commenting on the actions of the character, either to reserve the reader with an interpretation or a form of light relief. In the village of Marlott, the poor pedlar John Durbeyfield is stunned to discover that he is descended from the D’Urbevilles, a once-wealthy aristocratic Norman family now extinct.\r\nThe difficult conditions of his family worsen after the death of their horse caused by their eldest daughter Tess, who consequently agrees to go to the D’Urberville estate and â€Å"claim kin” (unaware of its non-existence). She gets a position as a poultry maid give thanks to A lec, the mistress’s lascivious son who forever makes undesired advances on her. He lastly takes value of her after a fair. She returns home and gives birth to a sickly child, who is christened Sorrow just before his death. After a year she seeks employment far from her prehistoric, i.e. in a distant valley, becoming a dairymaid at the Thalbothays Dairy. There she re-encounters Angel, a reverend’s son apprenticing as a farmer. They fall in love, yet Tess is uncertain whether to reveal him her past and resolves to clipping a confessional letter under his door, which unfortunately ends under the carpet. The marriage goes smoothly nevertheless when on their espousals night they confess each other their past Angel is struck dumb, and resolves to leave her, boarding a ship for Brazil.\r\nTess experiences many sufferings and difficulties and is obliged to accept a job at an hardscrabble farm. During a flip she overhears a wandering preacher who turns out to be none else than Alec, converted to Methodism by Reverend Clare. Tess lastly accepts his proposal to support her family after her father’s death. However, Angel returns from Brazil and seeks Tess to ask her forgiveness, but she stoically refuses. Heartbroken to the point of madness, she stabs Alec to death and flees to Angel. She is arrested at Stonehenge, where she snarl asleep on a large rock, and is eventually executed. He is the most important pessimistic novelist of late Victorian England due to many reasons: first of all, he was born in the Hungry 40s, a blockage in which the price of bread was kept high school by the Corn laws and many people devouring(a) to death; secondly his first marriage was an unhappy, childless one, though he felt remorseful after his wife’s death; lastly he was influenced by Darwin and his vision of life as a never-ending struggle for the selection of the fittest as well as by Schopenhauer ‘s human race governed by the blind â€Å"Imma nent will”, and he started to cast off into discussion his religious faith.\r\nFurthermore, he was profoundly stirred by the collapse of the rustic world, which he love and experienced first-handedly since his birth. In fact his county, Dorsetshire, in South West England, was suffering from the consequences of the mechanization of agriculture, the severe economic crises of the 70s and the mass-migration to the towns. Hardy argues that life is a struggle for survival against wicked impersonal powers. Love is a cataclysmic natural instinct. In fact man is in thrall to fate, i.e. an impersonal unforeseeable entity governing over both the inside and outside of man (personality and surroundings). Therefore human life is nothing but a useless, excruciating struggle with destiny, also known as Immanent will as per his reading of Arthur Schopenhauer .\r\nIt is a kind of Anti-Providence, an unstoppable apparatus operating through a series of unfortunate coincidences. According to Ha rdy, the universe is at the mercy of Chance, blindfolded casualness either unconcerned or antagonistic to man. As a matter of fact, in Tess this malignant power amuses itself by tormenting her to death. â€Å"Justice was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess”. Tess, and, more generally, man, is a marionette in the hands of Chance, a worthless varmint in the universe. Tess is fated to sorrow and death from the very mo she came into being. There are three important themes in his works: the difficulty of being alive; nature, uninfluenced by man’s fate yet co-protagonist with him; Victorian hypocrisy, which is criticized as well as schematic moralism, in particular as far as women are concerned: in fact Tess, a falling woman as per Victorian morals, is presented as a pure, guiltless victim of chance and her love interests.\r\nHis language is measured, abundant in details and symbolism. The metaphors, similes and pe rsonifications he employs reflect his love for nature. The language of sense impressions is profound to his writing, as objects are perceived through touch, sight, sizable and smell. Though his novels were composed during a period of literary experimentation, he persevered in employing the Victorian omniscient narrator, who is eternally present, sometimes commenting on the characters or events by expressing his opinions and assimilate on life. Furthermore, he anticipates the cinema in that he employs narrative techniques alike to the camera eye and the zoom (e.g. in Far from the madding crowd).\r\n'