PART I: INTRODUCTION

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There are many changes in the world in the 19th century.It was characterized by sharp contradictions and was an age of progress:railways and steamships were built,great scientific discoveries were made,education became more widespread,but at the same time it was an age of profound social unrest,because there was too much poverty,too much injustice,too much ugliness,and above all,fierce exploitation of man by man.Owing to the growth of scientific inventions,industry was mechanized,wealth was increased but only the few was enriched at the expense of the many.For example,England became the richest country in the world towards the middles of the 19th century with the conditins of life for the workers in the growing industries such as:dirty factories,inhumanly long hours of work,child labor,exploitation of both men and women workers,low wages,slums and frequent unemployment.

Moreover,by the thirties of the 19th century English capitalism had entered a new stage of development.England had became a classical capitaist country,a country of industrial capitalism.The Industrial Revolution on gathered force as the 19th century progressed,and worked profound changes in both the economic and the social of the country.In addition,there were many theories created by bourgeois ideologists.The attempts of the bourgeois to solve social contracdictionts amt to turn aside the attention of the workers from political struggle ended in failure.But the workers fought for their rights.Their political demands were expressed in the People’s Charter in 1833.The Chartists introduced their own literature,which was the first attempt to create a literature of working class.The Chartist writers tried their hand at different genres.They wrote articles,short stories,songs,epigrams,poems.Their leading genre was poetry.They describes the struggle of the workersfor their rights,they showed the ruthless exploitatiion and the miserable fate of the poor.

In fact,the ideas of Chartism attracted the attention of many progressive-minded people of the time.many prominent writers became aware of the social injustices around them and tried to picture them in their works.Thus this priod of fierce class struggle was mirrored in literature by appearance of a new trend,that of Critical realism.The greatest novelists of the age are:Charles Dicken,William Makepeace Thackeray,charlottle Bronte,Elizabeth Gaskell.They use the novel as a mean to protest against the evils in contemporary social and economic life and to picture the world in a realistic way.They introduced a new characters inti literature:the working class.They expressed deep sympathy for the working people,described the unbearable conditions of their life and work,voiced a passionate protest against exploitation and described their persistent struggle forr their rights.The greatness of these novelists lies not only in their truthful description of contemporary life,but also in their profound humanism.Their sympathy lies with the ordinary labouring people.They belived in the good qualities of the human heart.