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  3. Charles Dickens, author, editor and social reformer is known for the vivid pi

Charles Dickens, author, editor and social reformer is known for the vivid pi

游客2025-01-03  5
问题    Charles Dickens, author, editor and social reformer is known for the vivid picture he painted of life in England in the early 19th century. London was featured in many of his novels. The city of London aroused in him many emotions-love, pity, frustration and excitement. Novels such as Great Expectations , The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities move from the problems of people living in London in the early 1800’s to those of people in cities almost anywhere.
   Yet if Dickens were to return to the London of the 1980’s, would he be able to recognise it? What would have changed?
   There is one aspect of London life in the 1800’s which is very noticeable in his novels- a pervading atmosphere of smoky gloom and dirt, of evil smells and grimy decay. Whatever one may think of London air today, with its traffic fumes and occasional smog, the Smoke Abatement Acts of the 19th century and the Clean Air of the 20th century have ensured that Dickens would find the London air had improved considerably.
    In Our Mutual Friend Dickens portrays the River Thames as a dangerous place polluted with filth, rats and corpses. He would be surprised to know that salmon now swim up the river into the pool of London and that thousands of Londoners relax by the river’s banks. Londoners also join tourists on pleasure trips to view the warehouses and wharves of the doekland areas past the Tower of London. It is Dickens’s description of these areas in his own time that gives such a powerful impression of a city swarming with poverty, commerce and crime in Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit.
   Some parts of London described by Dickens changed as a result of public reaction to the vivid pictures he portrayed. Some of the worst slums disappeared in his lifetime. People are no longer imprisoned for debt in England today.
   Dickens’s experience of poverty and later of riches in London developed what modern writers might call his love/hate relationship with the city. Dickens himself refers. to "the attraction of repulsion" which he felt for London as a child when he was working long hours in a blacking factory.  In the streets of London, and in its society, Dickens with his reporter’s eye and reformer’s heart, found precisely what he needed to develop as a novelist and as a public figure.
   One change which would be unlikely to surprise Dickens is the way in which London has developed into a sprawling metropolis, devouring places such as Finchley, Hampstead and Camden Town which were villages and suburbs in Dickens’s time. He would have expected the increase in London’s commuter population. Long before the coming of commuter railways in the 1860’s, as many as two hundred thousand individuals came daily into the city on foot or by omnibus from the rich houses bordering the Thames out to Chelsea. As the city developed, the advantages of suburban living were extended to the middle classes. Wemmick in Great Expectations extols the pleasures of his small "Castle" and garden in Walworth, the upkeep of which depends on his work in the city of London and his dubious connections there.
   The sprawling, exciting ferment of organised chaos which London appears to be, still contains buildings familiar to Dickens. Just outside Bush House, the home of the BBC’s External Services, is the Church of St. Mary-le-Strand where Dickens’s parents were married in 1809. Across the roads is the supposedly Roman bath where he bathed as a child and which he later used in David Copper field. Not far away in Bloomsbury in 48 Doughty Street, Dickens wrote most of the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist. It is now the home of the Dickens House Museum. At his own request there is no public memorial to Charles Dickens, but the Dickens House Museum is a centre for all those to whom his characters are more "real" than many in history. [br] Wemmick, in Great Expectation, might work in the city of London and ______ .
选项 A、live in suburbs
B、spend weekends in suburbs
C、enjoy his vacations in suburbs
D、maintain his estate in suburbs
答案 A
解析 从倒数第二段最后两句我们可推断Wemmick属于中产阶级，他在市中心上班以支付郊区住所的开支。因此A正确。“Castle”一词打了引号，也就是说Wemmick住的并不是真正的城堡。
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