首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality. "If I cou
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality. "If I cou
admin
2015-06-14
29
问题
There is an immediacy about Charles Dickens’s life, just as there is about his novels, a kind of bursting physicality. "If I couldn’t walk fast and far," he once said, "I think I should explode and perish." He exhilarated and exhausted himself. Both these biographies, timed for the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth, bring out the mad energy of the man.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst sets out to counter what he sees as the literary man-of-destiny version of Dickens, to recover the uncertainty, muddle and loose ends. He concentrates therefore on the early unsettled years, up to 1838 when, at 26, Dickens decided to sign himself "Charles Dickens". Until then he had just been "Boz", a sketch writer and the hugely popular author of The Pickwick Papers.
But writing was hardly a proper job. Since the age of 15, he had been racing through more plausible alternatives: from legal clerk, to courtroom and parliamentary shorthand reporter, then on to journalism and ambitions in the theatre. Mr.Douglas-Fairhurst’s early cut-off date enables him to slow these years down, to listen for the echoes between the life and the writings and to draw on a broad range of contemporary references.
As he shows, the question of alternatives, of the road taken or not taken, fascinated Dickens. "See how near I may have been to another sort of life," he wrote of himself at 20 when he had been on the point of auditioning as an actor. Or, more fearfully, he wrote of his 12-year-old self: "I might easily have been...a little robber or a little vagabond. " He came that close, he believed, when his father(the model for Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield)was imprisoned for debt and, as was customary, the family joined him except for young Charles who took lodgings and was set to work in a blacking factory.
It was the defining trauma of his life. It opened the crack in his imagination through which he saw, a hair’s breadth away, a whole world of other sorts of life: from the man next to him in the library, in his Boz sketch Shabby-genteel People, who blacked his clothes to hide the frays, to the terrified criminal in the condemned cell in A Visit to Newgate, just feet away from a whistling passer-by.
Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst covers much ground, but one of his central ideas is Dickens’s pervasive sense of what might have been. He sees it in the false trails and shadow plots(take Great Expectations, where Pip imagines himself in one story though is really in another), in his doublings among characters and in his jostling possibilities and competing outcomes(for instance in A Christmas Carol).
Becoming Dickens is an ingenious, playful and often brilliant analysis as much as it is a narrative. In a sense, Claire Tomalin’s enormous task is more straightforward. She tells a story. Clear-eyed, sympathetic and scholarly, she spreads the whole canvas, alive with incident and detail, with places and people. She writes of publishers, illustrators, collaborators and all Dickens’s intersecting circles of friends and family. It is wonderfully done.
Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst observes that almost nothing can be said of Dickens of which the opposite is not also true. Ms. Tomalin richly bears that out. Here is the loyal friend and philanthropist, the champion of the poor— and also the bully. Here too is the man who could light up a room, the clown, the mimic and dancer of hornpipes - but also the obsessive who prowled the streets unable to "get rid of my spectres unless I can lose them in crowds".
After his death, Dickens’s daughter Katey said that she had loved him immeasurably, but that he was "a wicked man". She was thinking of her mother Catherine, so passive, so overlooked and so constantly pregnant(they had ten children). Having decided she was the wrong wife for him, Dickens literally partitioned off her bed, then forced her into a separation while mocking her to their friends. Ms. Tomalin takes care to notice Catherine and the other women in Dickens’s life. Power was vital to him, the power to make his public laugh and cry and love him for it better still, to see them do it at his famous public readings. But a brutal streak went with it.
Ms. Tomalin ends with an exhausted Dickens splashing his head in a bucket of water, and writing on. After all, it is the writer she is interested in, his range, invention and universality. Everyone read him in his lifetime, high and low. Speaking of Pickwick, she remarks that Dickens seemed to feed his story "directly into the bloodstream of the nation...making his readers feel he was a personal friend to each of them. " When he died, among the flowers at his graveside in Westminster Abbey were small bunches tied with rags.
Ms.Tomalin’s attitude towards Dickens can be best described as
选项
A、fairly objective.
B、mainly appreciative.
C、slightly disapproving.
D、strongly approving.
答案
B
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/JAOO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
UnderWilliam’srule,the______wereatthebottomofthefeudalsystem.
TheBritishEmpirewasoncehometothirdofthe【M1】________.world’spopulation.But,withtheretur
A、hethoughtMr.SunhaswrittentheletterwellB、thereissomethingwrongaboutthegrammerC、theycanbeimprovedaccordingt
TheProblemsofTakingEnglishCoursesThroughEnglishWhenstudentstakecoursesthroughthemediumofEnglish,theyhaveto
Waldenwaswrittenby
DaisyMilleriswrittenby
TheimmigrantscomingtoBritainaremainlyfrom______.
Americaneconomistsoncespoofeduniversityeducationastheonlyindustryinwhichthosewhoconsumeitsproductdonotpurchas
TheWorldBankfiguresshowsharppriceincreasesinwheat,maize,sugar,and【N1】______overthepastsixmonths,withpricesal
Bahrainioppositionactivistssayateenageboy
随机试题
衡量社会发展状况的最基本标准是()
闭合性肾损伤使用抗生素的原则是
根据《药品管理法》的规定,第—类精神药品的处方,除特殊需要外,每次不得超过几日的常用量
根据《建设工程安全生产管理条例》的规定,属于施工单位安全责任的是()。
基金管理人职责终止的情形包括()。Ⅰ.被基金份额持有人大会解任Ⅱ.被依法取消基金管理资格Ⅲ.依法解散、被依法撤销或者被依法宣告破产Ⅳ.不公平地对待其管理的不同基金财产
某企业2015年4月向境外企业租赁一台大型设备,租期1年,支付租金10万元,另支付境内运费、保险费2万元。2016年4月,企业决定将该设备买下,双方成交价格60万元,海关审定的留购价格65万元,以上金额均为人民币。该企业2016年4月应缴纳关税()
漏接是指由于某种原因旅游团推迟抵达某站,导游员仍按原计划预定的班次或车次接站而没有接到旅游团。()
下列符合儿童动作发展规律的是()。
关于人民法院对罪犯判处没收财产的处罚,下列表述正确的是:
It’sabird.ButIdon’tknow______name.
最新回复
(
0
)