CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS HOMEWORK – CHARLES DICKENS – TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

− From Oliver Twist, Oliver wants some more, pp. 302-304 (text book 1+2)

The extract consists of a scene taken from the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens which takes place in a poor workhouse of a parish full of starved children; their hunger gradually increased due to humble rations of food, and so they aimed to send someone of them (Oliver himself after rolling the dices) to ask the master for more gruel. After his request “the assistants were paralyzed with wonder, the boys with fear”: the council stated for his estrangement from the parish at the moderate price of 5£ by the next morning to anyone who needed a versatile apprentice.

The narrator is an omniscient voice outside the novel, which filters reality from a point of view which brings to surface the main problems of the time like poverty, orphans banished in parishes and the gap between social classes which better witnessed how the Industrial Revolution didn’t bring wellness as well as it produced wealth.

The extract opens with a detailed description of “the room in which the boys were fed” which highlights modesty and misery of life conditions at the time: the use of paratactic syntax emphasizes clearly and cruelly a thorough illustration of the background within the scene is set, while the use of units of measure (mass, height and time) allows the reader to make a precise idea of scarcity of rations in comparison with today’s ones and of the prolonged time lapse people could suffer hunger pangs.

The characters in the sequence belong to two different and antithetical worlds: the orphans represent misery of lower classes while the gentlemen (Mr Bumble, Mr Limbkins and, in part, the assistants) stand for health and modest wellness. Their characterization is obviously different: children’s eyes are connoted as eager, hungry and wild with reference to refectory’s bowls and spoons, while the master and Limbkins are described as two healthy and fat men, thanks to a focus on their clothes, a cook’s uniform and a white waistcoat.

Finally the reader can notice a hierarchical order according to which one or more personalities were submitted  to others: at the bottom there were the children subdued to restrictive rules, then the “pauper assistants” under Mr Bumble, and at the top Mr Limbkins, whose “prophetic gentleman’s opinion” was undeniable.

− The exploitation of children: Dickens and Verga. Rosso Malpelo, pp. 306 (text book 1+2)

The present extract is taken from Rosso Malpelo, a short novel by Giovanni Verga contained in the collection Vita dei Campi. The text deals with children’s exploitation and might be useful for reflecting on that theme comparing the text with the previous extract from Oliver Twist.

First of all let’s focus on the main characters: the two protagonists are both young, poor and, in a way or another, orphan. Despite the reader does not know yet Oliver’s job, the children share their condition of juvenile exploitation and hard-working in precarious conditions.

One can’t forget England had just experienced social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, while southern Italy suffered its backwardness in respect to the north and paid the costs of a still feudal agriculture and the mistreatment of mineral resources; so the two backgrounds fostered the actualizing and the development of the exploitation of children.

Both novelists chose to support poetry of Realism (Verism in Italy with Verga), without hiding the awareness of a disarming misery the social contexts were invaded by: this is witnessed thanks to the use of a semantic field already found in the previous text made up of words like “pelle, minatore, arnesi, piccone, zappa, lanterna, sacco, pane, fiasco del vino”

− Charles Dickens, The definition of a horse p. 309-311 (textbook 1+2)

The present extract is taken from the novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens; it deals with an ordinary lesson at school held by Mr Thomas Gradgrind, "a man of realities, facts and calculations." He identifies a student, called Girl number twenty (Sissy Jupe), whose father is a “farrier and horsebreaker”, commanding her to give the definition of a horse. However, taken by anxiety, she could not be able to answer and another child (Bitzer) defined the animal by means of scientific biological classifications.

Each character’s name suggests his  own personality:

• Thomas Gradgrind is a composed name, made up of grade and grind : indeed he is a hard educator who grinds his students through a factory-like process, hoping to produce graduates (grads).
• Sissy Jupe (Cecilia) is unlike is the only student identified and connoted by physical characterization thus far in the novel. Moreover she is the single female presented, as a contrast to the row of hardened mathematical men. Her last name, "Jupe," comes from the French word for "skirts" and her first name, Cecilia, represents the sainted patroness of music.
• "Bitzer", the wiseacre pupil,  has the name of a horse; this ironically and adds to the sense of pupil being like animals

Finally the main theme here is educational process at England’s Hard Times. Gradgrind’s philosophy of fact is intimately related to the Industrial Revolution, a cause of the mechanization of human nature. Dickens suggests that when humans are forced to perform the same monotonous tasks repeatedly they become like the machines with which they work, in other words depersonalized.

Besides Bitzer’s answer seems mechanical, like if Grandgrid’s question implied a process of query in his database (his brain) which made him infer the definition in an automated way.

Again the use of epithet “number twenty” reinforces the hypothesis of a serial and standard education in an industrialized England: the students are mere “users” of a system trough which knowledge is instilled automatically and without any kind of amusement which, in a way or another, might have promoted a curious and funny thirst of knowledge inside the children.