Rendering

Paraphrase the piece of criticism and go on speaking on the theme: Reproduce in class!

“The essential value and truth of Dickens’s writings have been unwisely lost sight of many thoughtful persons, merely because he presents his truth with some colour of caricature. Unwisely, because Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken. Allowing for his manner of telling them, the things he tells us are always true. I wish that he could think it right to limit his brilliant exaggeration to works written only for public amusement; and when he takes up a subject of high national importance, such as that which he handled in Hard Times, that he would use severer and more accurate analysis. The usefulness of that work (to my mind, in several respects, the greatest he has written) is with many persons severely diminished, because Mr. Bounderby is a dramatic monster instead of a characteristic example of a worldly master; and Stephen Blackpool a dramatic perfection, instead of a characteristic example of an honest workman. But let us not lose the use of Dickens’s wit and insight, because he chooses to speak in a circle of stage fire. He is entirely right in his main drift and purpose in every book he has written; and all of them, but especially Hard Times, should be studied with close and earnest care by persons interested in social questions. They will find much that is partial, and, because partial, apparently unjust; but if they examine all the evidence on the other side, which Dickens seems to overlook, it will appear, after all their trouble, that his view was the finally right one, grossly and sharply told.

Dickens. The old curiosity shop. Chapters IV-XII

The aim of the lesson remains the same. You’ll also learn to find sensual details aimed at creating images and to define the role of description.

1. The episodes of a narrative are said to fall into two main categories: plot incidents and character incidents. The former make the story move forward, being responsible for the further development of the plot; the latter type does not stimulate the development of the plot but contributes to the study of human nature. Some episodes have both functions ………………….

Outside the context of the whole narrative, the chapters under discussion present a series of seemingly disconnected episodes, not yet cemented, in the reader’s eye, by the author’s conception.

In the first episode, Mrs. Quilp and her mother Mrs. Jiniwin received “some-dozen ladies of the neighbourhood who had happened by a strange accident to drop in one after another, just a bout tea time.” In the second a few scenes from the Quilps’ family life are introduced.

Name in the like manner the other episodes presented in the chapters discussed

(sum them up in a phrase, so as to reflect the author’s attitude to them).

2. Divide all the episodes of the chapters into plot incidents, character incidents and those that can be viewed upon both as plot and character incidents.

3. Representing his characters, delineating their mode of life, relations with each other and the world itself, describing their apartments, Dickens resorts to a huge number of various details. It seems that there is no smallest thing escaped the keen eyesight of the acute observer. He mentions qualitative and quantative characteristics, speaks of the arrangement of things (“a few fragments of rusty anchors; several large iron rings; some piles of rotten wood; and two or three heaps of old sheet copper, crumbled, cracked and battered” p. 39) he sees, gives through description of appearance, features clothes of his characters, omitting no gesture or phrase (Mr. Brass “was a tall, meager man, with a nose like wen, a protruding forehead, retreating eyes, and hair of a deep red. He wore a long black surtout and cotton stockings of a bluish grey. He had a cringing manner, but … p. 103).

Dickens is a great master of looking for a visual detail appealing directly to the senses of an immediate observer and creating an image. Sometimes he appeals not only to our vision but to the other senses too (those of hearing, taste, touch, smell). The author delights in exaggeration, in a free play of imagination (“He (Daniel Quilp) ate hard eggs, shell and all devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, … drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent…” p. 52; “… The boy … would have smoked a small lime-kiln if anybody ad treated him with it” p. 104). Sometimes he provides the reader with a piece of description summarizing his general attitude to a person or a certain state of things (“And so he went on, content to read the book of her heart from the page first presented to him, little dreaming of then story that lay hidden in its other leaves, and murmuring within himself that at least the child was happy” p. 85) Thus, by means of enumeration and accumulation of details the images are created.

Select and analyse some pieces of description, read them out and explain how the details help the writer to render the atmosphere of the place, to reveal his attitude to the objects and people described.