Английский язык. Часть I. Коныгина Г.И - 6 стр.

and reader. Dickens was rapidly developing his craft as a novelist and soon be-
came the most popular author of the day. Descriptive power, analytical percep-
tion of character, fancy, pathos, humour and charm of style are the qualities of
Dickens’s early novels that deeply impressed the reading world. On the strength
of this success, Dickens received numerous proposals from London publishers.
The following years were highly prolific and made him a literary celebrity.
Finding serialization congenial and profitable, Dickens influenced the publish-
ing industry in Great Britain because this method of publication quickly became
popular among Dickens's contemporaries.
   In 1836, a fruitful year for Dickens, the success permitted him to marry Cath-
erine Hogarth, the eldest daughter of a respected Scottish journalist and man of
letters, George Hogarth who edited Sketches by Boz.
   D___. During the 1840s his social criticism became more radical, his charac-
ters more realistic and versatile and his comedy more savage. The novels Oliver
Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Dombey and Son, David
Copperfield increased his fame and enlarged his readership.
   The mature novels of the 1850s ( Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit )
present an increasingly sombre picture of contemporary society. The novelist is
politically more despondent, emotionally more tragic. The satire is harsher, the
humour less genial and abundant, the “happy endings” more subdued than in the
early fiction. Technically, the later novels are more coherent, plots being more
fully related to themes, and themes being often expressed through a more insis-
tent use of imagery and symbols. Dickens is presenting characters of greater
complexity that provoke more complex responses in the reader. E___.
   In his final novels of the 1860s ( A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations,
Our Mutual Friend ) Dickens remained inventive, adventurous and experiment-
ing. These works of great social relevance continue his critical approach to prob-
lems of contemporary society. How Dickens’s final unfinished novel The Mys-
tery of Edwin Drood ((published posthumously, 1870) would have developed is
uncertain. It was left tantalizingly uncompleted at the time of his death.
   F___. He edited the weekly periodicals, administered charitable organiza-
tions, pressed for many social reforms, lectured in the United States in favour of
an international copyright agreement and in opposition to slavery.
   Charles Dickens was a theatre enthusiast. G___. He directed and acted in
amateur theatricals. In collaboration with Wilkie Collins he wrote a play The
Frozen Deep which was performed for Queen Victoria.
   Throughout his life, Dickens travelled widely visiting Canada, France, Italy,
Switzerland and the United States of America.
   Dickens's extraliterary activities also included giving phenomenally success-
ful public readings of his own works in Britain and America.
   H___. The married couple had been for many years "temperamentally un-
suited" to each other. Dickens, although charming and brilliant, was emotionally
insecure (probably due to his childhood), and therefore was extremely hard to
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