Dickens and Verga

Charles Dickens and Giovanni Verga

"Rosso Malpelo" and "Oliver Twist"

Index

"Rosso Malpelo" G. Verga

Social Background

Personalities and reactions

Victorian Age

Data

Use of irony

Post-unification Italy

Team

Conclusion

"Oliver Twist" C. Dickens

Thanks

01

Social background

VICTORIAN AGE

Oliver Twist is set in the industrial revolution period of victorian England, and this period was characterized by:

• Period of enourmous changes
• Children were explited for difficult jobs
• Immigration
• Children worked in very bad conditions
• Low salary
• Victorian society was characterized by great inequalities

POST-UNIFICATION ITALY

Rosso Malpelo is set towars the end of 19th century, in Sicily, and this period is characterize by:

• Inhomogeneous industrial reality
• Italy lacking in many aspects
• country of almost 22 million abitants

"Oliver Twist"

Oliever Twist is a poor boy with unkownk parents. He is brought up in work house in an inhuman way. Then the cruelty and the unhappiness he experienced with his new monster come him to run away to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of young pick pockets, who try to make a thief out of him, but the boy is helped by an old gentlemen.At the end a middle class family adopted him and the gang is arrested

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" I want some more"

Oliver Twist

"Rosso Malpelo"

Rosso Malpelo is a young man who works in a sicilian cave and who is believed by all to be evil because of his red hair. For this reason, the young man is dislike by his family, who are ashamed of him, and mistreated by his fellow workers. In response to this, Malpelo lives completely isolated. At one point he meet Ranocchio, they become friend, but then his friend falls in and dies. Malpelo remains alone and decides to hole up in the cave where he worked, and he will nevere come out of there again, thus becoming the ghost that everyone fears.

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" Per noi che siamo fatti per vivere sottoterra, dovrebbe essere buio sempre e da per tutto "

Rosso Malpelo

vs

"Oliver Twist"

• Orphan
• Last of the society
• Innocent
• Dishonest life as a criminal
• He think only of himself
• Strong character
• He has an happy ending

"Rosso Malpelo"

• "Mischievous and mean"
• Victim of society ("beast")
• Aggressive
• Vents anger on Ranocchio
• Think also of the mother and sister
• At the end he died

Use of irony

• Dickens uses his irony to ridicule the hypocrisy and pretentiousness of the Victorian nobility, exposing the cruelty and injustice he saw in the society of his time.

• Verga relies on irony to create the possibility of different judgment on the facts. In Rosso Malpelo the narrator adopts both the popular belief, according to which those with red hair are bad, and the prejudice that interprets any gesture of the boy as bad, resulting in his exclusion

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Thanks!

Made by Caterina Lucarelli, Edoardo Maccari, Stefano Mancini, Mattia Lullo e Samuele Menchi