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A study of aspects of reform in certain novels of Charles Dickens.

This is a study of Charles Dickens's conceptions of America as a result of his trips to America from January to July, 1842, and from November, 1867 to April, 1868.

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

This work argues that the dynamics of the oral and of the literate consciousness play a vital role in the characterization of Bleak House. Through an application of Walter Ong's synthesis of orality/literacy research, Krook's residual orality is seen to play a greater role in his characterization than his more frequently discussed spontaneous combustion. Also, the role orality and literacy plays in understanding Dickens's satire of "philanthropic shams" is analyzed. This study concludes that an awareness of orality and literacy gives the reader of Bleak House a consistent framework for evaluating the moral quality of its characters and for understanding the broader social message underlying Dickens's topical satire.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Stockholm, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-94).

While the study of Charles Dickens’s religion has produced various results, few would contest that Dickens’s religious views are shaped by his peculiar emphasis on Jesus and the Gospels. As to the precise nature of his views and the degree to which his commitment to the Christian faith extends, however, a much lesser degree of consensus has been established. I attempt to demonstrate here that at the heart of his work is a conspicuous Christian worldview, which is grounded squarely in the imitation of Jesus and which pervades his life and his work in the most profound yet unobtrusive ways. I argue, then, that Dickens’s The Life of Our Lord is a definitive source in the Dickens corpus for our understanding of his Christian thought and worldview. Moreover, as a serious expression of Dickens’s understanding of Christianity, The Life of Our Lord also functions as an index to his Christian thought in the larger Dickens corpus. Of first importance then, I attempt to establish the authority of The Life of Our Lord as a composition that will bear the full weight of such assertions. Then, I analyze its content as to its implicit theology in order to establish not only its thoroughgoing Christian character but also to demonstrate that it reveals Dickens’s own genuine Christian conviction manifested in all his work. Drawing the work to a close, I attempt to demonstrate how The Life of Our Lord helps us to understand Dickens’s churchmanship and his relationship to the church. In the end, I comment on its intended purpose as moral instruction for his children exemplifying his understanding of Christianity. The study demonstrates throughout how the Christianity embodied and articulated in The Life of Our Lord is consistently and naturally reflected in all of Dickens’s work, whether fiction, journalism or correspondence.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de seminario para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / This work is in line with the main theme in our seminar ‘The City and the urban subject in English and American Literature’. In the course of it we have studied the first appearance of the urban subject, amazed by the new metropolitan surroundings that he finds himself in. Then comes the Fláneur who observes, sometimes as an outsider, the new bohemian life in the big cities and finally cannot find a place to fit in the crowd, or either enjoying the crowd in their loneliness. In literature, the cities are built up by the narrator; here is where detail shows its power to set full images in our minds. Cities we know as the back of our hands and like to wander to recall the past, cities we meet for the first time and would like to walk all over, and cities we knew when they were great and now we find destroyed. That we have studied concerning the city. However, this present work is almost entirely related to the urban subject and how they manage to live in the ever-growing city.