![]() ![]() Then in 1854, he published his vision of a northern industrial town in Hard Times.ĭickens was not alone in his fictional representation of the 'condition of England' - other examples include Benjamin Disraeli's Sibyl, or the Two Nations (1845), and Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855). Dickens keenly felt his deprived education during his time at the blacking factory, and according to the authoritative biography by his lifelong friend and literary advisor John Forster, it was from these times that he drew Davids working period. ![]() Bleak House (1853), from which the extracts below are taken, similarly described life as lived in the seamier parts of London. Oliver Twist (1838) portrayed the 'rookeries' of London, the crime-ridden areas from which Fagin and his gang preyed on their victims. Memories of the prison, and of his later spell working as a young boy in a blacking factory, never left Dickens and gave him a deep sense of the miseries suffered by the poor. gave a deep sense of the miseries suffered by the poor.' (His feckless parent was eventually used by Dickens as the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield). Charles Dickens's masterful assault on the injustices of the British legal system As the interminable case of 'Jarndyce and Jarndyce' grinds its way through the Court of Chancery, it draws together a disparate group of people: Ada and Richard Clare, whose inheritance is gradually being devoured by legal costs Esther Summerson, a ward of court, whose parentage is a source of deepening mystery. ![]() His own father's total incapacity for financial management had led him and his family to a debtors' prison - where the young Charles witnessed misery at very close quarters. Charles Dickens was no stranger to the poverty and despair of London and other great cities in the first half of the 19th century. ![]()
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