As simplistic and politically impartial as Victorian novels and their common familial themes of love and companionship may seem, there is customarily a greater sociopolitical concern inserted within the narrative for the reader of the time to have...

In Western literature, sacrifice is often regarded as a noble act because it invokes the powerful image of Christ's death. Many writers throughout history have used this familiar association to reprimand the prevalence of selfishness in the human...

Tumbling out of the cart, clashing into the dark grey stone, the cask explodes over the pavement, its contents seeping into the jagged cracks of the street. Perplexed by the event, the people watch intently before hastily running towards the...

From even the beginning of civilization, social hierarchy molded the formation and development of society. Whether it be the power of a single monarch or that of a democratic board of officials, authority always induces change in both the lives of...

Charles Dickens was a famous critic of his time. He took on Victorian ideals and issues that he viewed as social injustices and criticized them, both in public speeches and in his writing. In his novels, these were primarily subjects like poverty...

Imagination is a key requirement when reading in order to interpret or “experience” significant settings and scenes that reflect specific moods throughout the story. An author’s use of adjectives through various senses helps the reader to do so....

Lasting from 1789 to 1799, the French Revolution is characterized by the uprisal of the lower class and the bloodshed associated with it. It is now recognized as the most violent, inhumane revolution in European history, and with it came new ideas...

Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities artfully weaves the story of the Manette family through the background of the French Revolution. Though, as readers know, uprising and overthrow in France is imminent, M. Manette and his daughter Lucie deal...

Dickens' Oliver Twist , which ultimately celebrates a protagonist who journeys from innocence to experience without capitulating to the evil forces that hinder his progress, addresses the pervasive problem of evil in society and human nature....

In writing Oliver Twist, it is clear that Charles Dickens’s main literary objective was to expose the plight of the poor in Victorian London. The story of Oliver is comparable to other Victorian novels, such as Jane Eyre, in its strong didactic...

Oliver Twist is a criticism of the society in which Charles Dickens lived. The book directly criticized the Poor Laws and attempted to inspire readers of the middle and upper classes to improve the intolerable conditions in which Dickens himself...

In what is arguably his best known work, Charles Dickens addresses the blatant gender inequality that ran rampant in the 1800s. Oliver Twist confronts the disheartening public view of not only women in lower social classes, like Nancy, but also...

In English novels, Jewish characters have been routinely described as greedy, nit-picking, and stingy misers. They are usually but not always merchants, money lenders, or bill brokers—Shylock from The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare,...

Oliver Twist is a novel that evades easy categorisation; what begins as a political satire of the 1834 Poor Law morphs into a detective novel which in turn becomes a melodramatic thriller with a surprisingly tidy ending. While Dickens juggles...

Charles Dickens was a famous critic of his time. He took on Victorian ideals and issues that he viewed as social injustices and criticized them, both in public speeches and in his writing. In his novels, these were primarily subjects like poverty...

While facets of Oliver’s identity are indisputably innate, such as his morality and one dimensional goodness, the majority of his identity and that of those around him are socially constructed and enforced upon them. Oliver’s own face, an...

This essay would consider the modes of sentimental realism as presented in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Charles Dickens Oliver Twist. In Dickens’ Oliver Twist, the narrator’s use of sentimentalism enables the readers to sympathise with the...

As the titles Bleak House and Hard Times suggest, there is an abundance in both of imagery, metaphor, and overarching plot that is unpleasant, rendered in such relishing detail as to suggest that Charles Dickens had, in the words of John Forster,...

The England of Charles Dickens was one plagued with disease, pollution, and poverty. This is the England that gave rise to the Salvation Army, the gin craze, and Benthamism, and it is no coincidence that Charles Dickens' Bleak House has much to...

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, is chiefly a novel about the consequences of abandonment. Dickens utilizes a mixture of nameless third-person narrative and the personal narrative of Esther Summerson, thereby balancing social criticism with a...

"I have the honour to attend Court regularly. With my documents. I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment." Bleak House.

In a novel so acutely dedicated to exposing the real and actual misery of its characters, very little of it arises...

Bleak House, a novel by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, has a number of elements: comedy, tragedy, melodrama, romance, and biting social satire. The work also includes at least ten major characters, and scores of minor ones. The novel's...

Charles Dickens was a famous critic of his time. He took on Victorian ideals and issues that he viewed as social injustices and criticized them, both in public speeches and in his writing. In his novels, these were primarily subjects like poverty...

With several different families displayed throughout Bleak House, Charles Dickens makes a point to emphasize motherhood, or lack thereof. Charley, a child herself, takes care of her two younger siblings, Liz and Jenny help raise each other’s...