INGLESE

Factory life during the Industrial revolution, The Victorian Age,

Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)

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FACTORY LIFE DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

During the Industrial revolution in 1802, many people moved from the countryside into the industrial cities and this caused great distress expecially to women.

In the factories people had to work long hours under harsh conditions. Factory owners and managers paid the minimum amount necessary for a work force.

Workers also had to labor for many hours, often more than 12 hours a day, sometimes more than 14, and people worked 6 days a week. These jobs were extremely dangerous for children. Often people lost hands or parts of their bodies.

Children were punished for arriving late at work and for talking to the other children.

There were reports that every year there were nearly a thousand peolpe treated for wounds and mutilations due to accidents.

THE VICTORIAN AGE

The Victorian Age in England was characterized by a quick industrial development and by vary important social and technological transformations which improved the birth of the middle class.

However it was a period characterized also by big contrasts and social problems caused by these developments which created also poverty and human degradation among mass workers. Positivism represents the athmosphere of this epoch also characterized by puritanism.

CHARLES DICKENS

He was born in Portsmouth in 1812 in a family in bad economical living conditions. When he was twelve, stopped studying and started to work for three months in a factory. These experience influenced his work a lot, expecially his novel “David Copperfield”. In this novel, Dickens uses the first person narrator and the effect of his narrative techniques was the autobiography.

DAVID COPPERFIELD

This novel is considered the best work of Dickens because in these pages, he describes his unhappy young experience in the figure of David Copperfield, his alter ego. The complexity of the plot, describes and analyses all the social classes of his time and he identifies them with his characters.

Like almost all Dicken's works, this novel was published in episodes every month in a newspaper and it was vary successful.

Many elements of this novel, were inspired by real events drawn from Dicken's life; in fact we can consider this story like an autobiography. He was a writer who lived in nineteenth ('800) century. This novel was considered as an example of “industrial novel” because in it was described poverty and hard living conditions during the Industrial revolution where women's and children's exploitation in the factories was extended. Charles Dickens uses alter ego David Copperfield to tell the story.

PLOT

The author started this novel in 1849 and finished it in 1850 .

David's father died before he was born and for this reason David had to grow up without a father but he lived with his mother and his house keeper Peggotty. Than, his mother got married to Mr Murdstone, a strict and insensitive man who tried to get David away from the family , sending him in a college. There, David met his best friend Steerforth. When he finished his years at the college, David came back home and found a new little brother and his mother, who was oppressed by her husband. In fact Mr Murdstone caused her death. When his mother died, David was sent in a factory to work hard.

During this period he lived with the Micawber family but he decided to escaped from London and after many adventures he reached Dover where his aunt Betsey Trotwood lived. She lived with her flatmate Mr Dick and she received David with open arms and they gave him the opportunity to study in Canterbury.

When he finished school he fell in love with a young woman called Dora but when she died, he discovered that his best friend Agnes, who he had met while studing in Canterbury, had fallen in love with him. At the end of the book he thinks about Agnes.

EXTRACT

In the extract that we have read in class, we have analized the part of the story when David is telling his story as an adult, recalls the time when he was seventeen and had just left school. Young David is trying to decide what he wants to be in life. Although he has bright hopes for his own future, he is at the same time aware of the limitations of his present horizons.

In the first part, he imagines his new life, he is ready to know a new world but he isn't really sure if he is happy or sad to leave school because he wants to discover new things and cross new horizons. At the same time, he is linked to his little world at scool. He feels him important there and is afraid of venturing into the adult world because he hasn't a realistic vision of his future. In his boyish mind, these visionary considerations are so powerful that he thinks to leave school without regret, because he is impatient to know how life is. His aunt tries to convince him to make a decision for his future, in fact she often asks him “What you would like to be?” but he hasn't particular inspiration for anything. The only thing that intrigues him is the navigation. In fact his desire is to take the command of a boat to go around the world in a voyage of discovery. But in the absence of such a possibility his main consideration is not to be a financial burden on his aunt and not to weigh upon her.

Mr Dick proposes that he should be a “brazier” but his aunt refuses this perspective. Infact she says that he has to take a little breathing-time to try to consider new points of view. She supposes that a little changed and a glimpse out of school, might be useful for David to make his own decision. She supposes him to take a little journey to relax.

David finds an agreement with his aunt. In this passage the adult Copperfield reflects on a moment in a young person's life when every thing seems possible and the future looks bright. This is the moment when one decides what he / she wants to be in his / her life.

David's aunt doesn't change her mind about the fact that at some level David can choose his future and that he must reflect before choosing so as not to have regrets later in his life.

THE CHARACTER OF DAVID

David is a young man with a vivid immagination and for this reason he is a dreamer but at the same time he has a sense of responsability for his aunt that supports him. He is an immaginative, dreamy character.