​「品读大师」查尔斯·狄更斯

「品读大师」查尔斯·狄更斯

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsea, England. His parents were middle-class, but they suffered financially as a result of living beyond their means. When Dickens was twelve years old, his family’s dire straits forced him to quit school and work in a blacking factory (where shoe polish was manufactured). Within weeks, his father was put in debtor’s prison, where Dickens’s mother and siblings eventually joined him. At this point, Dickens lived on his own and continued to work at the factory for several months. The horrific conditions in the factory haunted him for the rest of his life, as did the experience of temporary orphanhood. Apparently, Dickens never forgot the day when a more senior boy in the warehouse took it upon himself to instruct Dickens in how to do his work more efficiently. For Dickens, that instruction may have represented the first step toward his full integration into the misery and tedium of working-class life. The more senior boy’s name was Bob Fagin. Dickens’s residual resentment of him reached a fevered pitch in the characterization of the villain Fagin in Oliver Twist.

查尔斯·狄更斯，1812年2月7日出生于英国波特西。父母是中产阶级，却因生活入不敷出而面临财务问题。狄更斯12岁时，窘迫的家境使他不得不辍学而进入黑色涂料工厂（生产鞋油的地方）工作。几周后，父亲因欠债入狱，后来母亲和兄弟姐妹也相继被逮捕。那时，狄更斯自力更生，在工厂里继续工作了几个月。工厂恶劣的环境和他暂时的孤儿状态，在他此后的生活中一直留有阴影。狄更斯显然没有忘记在仓库里的那一天，一个年长的男孩自作主张地教导狄更斯怎么更高效地工作。对狄更斯来说，那次教导意味着他初次融入工人阶级穷苦而乏味的生活。那个年长的男孩名叫鲍勃·费金。狄更斯对他抹不去的怨恨，在《雾都孤儿》中坏蛋费金这一角色的刻画中得到最淋漓尽致的体现。

Charles Dickens

After inheriting some money, Dickens’s father got out of prison and Charles returned to school. As a young adult, he worked as a law clerk and later as a journalist. His experience as a journalist kept him in close contact with the darker social conditions of the Industrial Revolution, and he grew disillusioned with the attempts of lawmakers to alleviate those conditions. A collection of semi-fictional sketches entitled Sketches by Boz earned him recognition as a writer. Dickens began to make money from his writing when he published his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, which was serialized beginning in 1836 and published in book form the following year. The Pickwick Papers, published when Dickens was only twenty-five, was hugely popular, and Dickens became a literary celebrity after its publication.

狄更斯的父亲在继承些许遗产后出狱，狄更斯也回到了学校。刚刚成年的他成为法律助理，后来又当了记者。记者的经历使他近距离地接触到工业革命中社会环境的阴暗面，而他试图改善这一现实的愿望随立法者的失败终告破裂。半虚构短篇集《博兹札记》使狄更斯的作家身份得到确立。从此，狄更斯开始以写作为生，他的第一部小说《匹克威克传》在1836年首次以连载方式刊登，第二年出版成书。《匹克威克传》在出版后取得了巨大的成功，这一年，狄更斯25岁。自此，他成为了文学界的名人。

Charles Dickens

In 1836, Dickens married Catherine Hogarth, but after twenty years of marriage and ten children, he fell in love with Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior. Soon after, Dickens and his wife separated, ending a long series of marital difficulties. Dickens remained a prolific writer to the end of his life, and his novels—among them Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield (Dickens’ most autobiographical novel), and Bleak House—continued to earn critical and popular acclaim. He died of a stroke in 1870, at the age of 58, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished.

1836年，狄更斯与凯瑟琳·霍加斯成婚，在结婚20年生育10个孩子后，他又和小自己好几岁的女演员爱伦·特南相爱。不久后，他和妻子分居，为他们持久的婚姻难题画上了句号。狄更斯是非常多产的作家，这种状态一直持续到晚年。他的小说——包括《远大前程》、《双城记》、《圣诞颂歌》、《大卫·科波菲尔》（狄更斯最具自传性质的小说），以及《荒凉山庄》——一直备受好评并广为流传。1870年，狄更斯死于中风，享年58岁，留下了尚未完成的《艾德温·德鲁德之谜》。

查尔斯·狄更斯

生活于19世纪维多利亚时期，他毕生的创作紧跟时代潮流，揭示封建贵族社会和资产阶级文化中的社会现实，和下层社会人民的悲惨生活。他对边缘人群的关注和对于形形色色的小人物的刻画，在文学史上是空前的。他笔下的很多主人公都是孤儿，如《雾都孤儿》中的奥利弗、《远大前程》中的孤儿皮普、以及《大卫·科波菲尔》中变成孤儿的大卫，这跟他曾经独自在鞋油工厂工作的经历不无关系。他对人物的描绘和对于人物情感的把握细致入微而又深入人心，使作品极具感染力。他的作品还具有浓重的理想主义和浪漫主义气息，尽管社会现实中充满苦难，他仍赞扬人性的真、善、美，憧憬更美好的生活。

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