2。1 The Connotation of the Fairy Tale 4

2。2 The Features of the Fairy Tale 4

2。3 Dickens’s Connection with the Fairy Tale 5

3。 Fairy Tale Colour of Characters in Hard Times 7

3。1 The Fairy-tale Way of Sculpturing Characters 7

3。1。1 Representatives of Typical Fairy-tale Characters 7

3。1。2 Fairy-tale Portrayal of Physical Appearance – Sharp Contrasts 8

3。2 The Fate of Characters 9

3。2。1 The Frequent Appearance of Fairy-tale-type Coincidence 9

3。2。2 The Fairy-tale Endings in Hard Times 10

4。 Factors that Influence Dickens to Bestow Fairy Tale Colour on Characters 12

4。1 The Impact of Dickens’s Own Life Experience 12

4。2 The Requirement of the Victorian Era 12

5。 Conclusion 14

References 15

1。 Introduction

1。1 General Introduction of Dickens

Charles Dickens is a distinguished writer and social critic in 19th century England, who is remembered today as a genius that wrote numerous literary classics。 Prolific as Dickens is, his literary works cover a wide range, including proses, dramas, books of travels, sketches and, significantly, novels。 In his thirty-four-year literary career, he wrote twenty fictions and created approximately two thousand vivid characters。 Not only the leading characters but many of the minor ones in his novels also leave unforgettable impressions on the reader’s mind (刘炳善, 2007: 302)。 His extraordinary character-portrayal brings him unprecedented popularity, and meanwhile he enjoys worldwide fame as the greatest representative of critical realism for his satirical and sharp description of social evils in capitalist system。 

Roughly speaking, Dickens’s literary career consists of mainly three stages。 The first stage refers to those years between 1836 and 1841 at which the novels Dickens created could nearly be comic tales based on the adventures of a central character, like The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist。 Works in this period, though serve as powerful exposures of crying social contradictions, are still marked with naive optimism, as the villains in his works are always caricatured and finally reform themselves to be kind and sympathetic。 The second period of Dickens’s literary career began in 1842 after he first visited to America, which led to his disillusion of humanitarian America。 The hypocritical and enormously corrupted American society shocked Dickens, and stung him into writing works like American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit to attack the bourgeoisie deeper and more powerful than at his early stage。 Then the publication of Bleak House in 1852 started Dickens’s last literary period of intensifying pessimism, during which the novels are much darker than before with “underlying tone of bitterness,” like Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities, focusing more on the suffering of common people。 

Matured artistically, Dickens combines his concern for the oppressed, his flair for narrative, and his creative invention of characters to produce some of the best novels in English literature, so he remains one of the most-read English authors in succeeding generations。 Fellow writers like George Orwell, G。 K。 Chesterton and Leo Tolstoy, praise Dickens’s passionate advocacy for the poor, prose fluency, realism, as well as his genius for satiric caricature, hence hail him as the foremost novelist and social satirist of his time。 Nevertheless, some critics have a love-hate relationship with Dickens’s works, finding them “mesmerizing” but still have some deficiencies。 Virginia Woolf admitted that Dickens is a benevolent optimist while reproved him for his sentimentalism (Mazzeno, 2009: 51)。 William Dawson praised Dickens as a creative genius yet claimed that at times he had a “tendency to fancifulness, to romance, to the grotesque” (Mazzeno, 2009: 67)。 Whether Dickens has been adored or despised, however, it is certain that he has always been the focus of the academic research。 With updates of research methodologies, more untapped values of Dickens have arose researchers’ attention。文献综述