“Born an item”. Fictional births in Dickens’s Novels.

Abstract

Starting from the well-known circumstances of his birth, the essay offers an appreciation of four novels by Charles Dickens, David Copperfield,  Little Dorrit, Dombey and Son, and Oliver Twist, which display an interesting juxtaposition between the protagonists’ birth and their parents’ death. In paying attention to his characters’ birth, Dickens moves along the path traced by eighteenth-century master novelists like Defoe, Fielding and Sterne, who introduced specific biographical data in their works that were meant to respond to the aristocratic idea of lineage. Interestingly, in Dickens’s novels the attention to biography is accompanied by either good-tempered humour or trenchant satire, apt to oppose the materialism of his age, which looked at individuals not as human beings, but as quantifiable entities. “Items” indeed.