Havisham Havisham "Havisham" is a poem written in 1993 by Carol Ann Duffy. It responds to Charles Dickens' character "Miss Havisham" from his novel "Great Expectations", looking at Havisham's mental and physical state many decades after being left standing at the altar, when the bride-to-be is in her old age. It expresses Havisham's anger at her fiancé and her bitter rage over wedding-day trauma and jilted abandonment. Duffy's use of language is very powerful and passionate. Throughout the poem oxymorons and juxtaposition such as ""Beloved sweetheart bastard"" and ""Love's hate"" portrays the ambivalence and restless uncertainty of the character, while a
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens For example, in his novel "Bleak House" Dickens mocks Mrs. Jellyby, who neglects her children for the natives of a fictional African country. The disjunction between Dickens' criticism of slavery and his crude caricatures of other races has also been noted by Patrick Brantlinger in his "A Companion to the Victorian Novel". He cites Dickens' description of an Irish colony in America's Catskill mountains a mess of pigs, pots, and dunghills. Dickens views them as a "racially repellent" group. Jane Smiley writing in the Penguin Lives bio of Dickens writes "we should not interpret him as the kind of left-liberal