Content Introduction main part. 1 Charles Dickens – his life and his best novel

MAIN PART.
1 Charles Dickens – his life and his best novel
The basic problems raised by English realists of the 19th century intheir works.Victoria became queen of Great Britain in 1837. Her reign, the longest in Englishhistory, lasted until 1901. This period is called Victorian Age.The Victorian Age was characterized by sharp contradictions. In many ways it wasan age of progress. The Victorian era marks the climax of England’s rise toeconomic and military supremacy. Nineteenth-century England became the firstmodern, industrialized nation. It ruled the most widespread empire in worldhistory, embracing all of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, andstable. There was too much poverty, too much injustice and fierce exploitation ofman by man.The workers fought for their rights. Their political demands were ex-pressed in thePeople’s Charter in 1833. The Chartist movement was a revolutionary movementof the English workers, which lasted till 1848. The Chartists introduced their ownliterature. The Chartist writers tried their hand at different genres. They wrotearticles, short stories, songs, epigrams, poems. Chartists (for example Ernest Jones“The Song of the Lower Classes”; Thomas Hood “The Song of the Shirt”)described the struggle of the workers for their rights, they showed the ruthlessexploitation and the miserable fate of the poor.The ideas of Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded peopleof the time. Many prominent writers became aware of the social injustice aroundthem and tried to picture them in their works. The greatest novelists of the agewere Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, ElizabethGaskell, George Eliot.These writers used the novel as a tool to protest against the evils in contemporarysocial and economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way. They expresseddeep sympathy for the working people; described the unbearable conditions oftheir life and work. Criticism in their works was very strong, so some scholarscalled them Critical Realists, and the trend to which they belonged – CriticalRealism. “Hard Times” by Charles Dickens and “Mary Barton” by Elizabeth
Gaskell are the bright examples of that literature, in which the Chartist movement
is described. The contribution of the writers belonging to the trend of realism in
world literature is enormous. They created a broad picture of social life, exposed
and attacked the vices of the contemporary society, sided with the common peoplein their passionate protest against unbearable exploitation, and expressed theirhopes for a better future.As for the poetry of that time, English and American critics consider AlfredTennyson, and Robert Browning to be the two great pillars on which Victorianpoetry rested. Unlike the poetry of the Romantic Age, their poetry demonstratedthe conservatism, optimism, and self-assurance that marked the poetry of theVictorian age.