GEORGE ORWELL
The real name of Gorge Orwell was Eric
Blair. He was born in India
in 1903 and he was a son of an English minor colonial official. When he was a
child he was taken to England
by his mother and he was educated at Eton
where he developed an indipendent minded personality, indifferent to accept
values, professing atheism and socialism. That is why he couldn’t stand the 646g64g
lack of privacy, the humiliating punishment and the values of English public
school.
When he finished school he passed the
examination for the India
imperial police but he spent there only 3 years because than he started to
develop an anti-imperialistic attitude. When he came back in London
he started a social experiment, for example wearing second-hand clothes and
living in the East End. In this way he learned
how the institution for the poor work. After a short period in Paris he decided to publish his works with
the pseudonym “George Orwell”.
In 1936 he went to Catalonia
to report Spanish Civil War and in “Homage to Catalonia” he was recall this experience
as a real convertion to socialism and the ideals of brotherhood and eguality.
When the second world war broke down he went to London where he joined
the BBC.
His last work is “1984”. It was
published in 1949 and George Orwell died of tuberculosis the following year. In
his works he insisted on tolerance and justice in human relationship.
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“1984”:
set in a grotesque and squallid London,
“1984” creates a world where there is no privacy, in which the Party has
absolute control and where every ribellius attitude was punished with prison,
torture and liquidation.
Everything
was subordinated to the State, such as the slogans, the posters proclaiming
“the big brother is watching you”, the telescreen in each room, the perpetual
state of war and so on. The language of the people was very simple and limited;
in this conditions was impossible to express their own
ideas. The protagonist is Winston Smith
and is the last man who believe in human value in a
totalitarian age. He’s a middle-age and physical weak and feel
a desire of moral and spiritual integrity. He work at
Ministry of Truth where he alters the record of the past to fit current Party
policy.
In
the first 2 parts of the novel is likely that the protagonist and the narrator
are the same person and there is Orwell’s views.
Orwell
combined various genres and style in an original way. The tone of the novel
became violent and pessimistic when he describe
Winston final defeat. The novels reveals Orwell’s high sense of history and his
sympathy for the million of people murdered in the name of totalitarian
ideology.
CHARLES DICKENS
Charles Dickens was born in Porthsmouth in 1812
and is one of the most popular english writer.
“Hard Times” is
his best-known novel where he describe the situation
in which he lived, full of the problems of industrial revolution. In his works
he doesn’t condemns the progress, but the narrow-mindedness of fanatic suppoter
of Utilitarism both in mills and schools where the children were prived of
their individual world of feelings and fantasy.
Dicken’s view is not a pessimistic one; he only
thing that situation can be better if not by institution still unpreparated to
control the changed of a country.
The demend of writing novels in instalments created an irresistible pressure on
Dickens to conform him to public taste.
Dickens was aware of the spiritual and
material corruption of present-day reality under the impact of industrialism;
the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards his society and in his
works he tried to draw the popular attention to public abuses.
Childrens are the most important characters in
his novels.
GEORGE GORDON
BYRON
He was born in London in 1788. after
inhering the title of Lord from his uncle, he took his seat in the Higher
Chamber of Parliament, where he supporter all liberal issues, including
Catholic Emancipation.
Than he left England
and lived in Switzerland and
Italy,
becoming involved in the Carbonari plots against the Austrians. His enormus
production of poems did not defeat the persistent ostracism of the English
public. He was not really innovative in his verse but the myth of Byronic hero
made him the most influent of the English romantic poets.
In
the final years of his life he went to Greece where he assisted them in
their war of indipendence against the Turks and where he died at the age of 36.
