Eliza Emily Donnithorne time in Australia, told the story to their father. However, they arrived in Australia after "Great Expectations" was published. Other historians propose an alternative explanation: that Dickens did not base Miss Havisham on Donnithorne, but that Sydney readers drew the connection when "Great Expectations" was published in 1861, and over time embellished Donnithorne's story with details borrowed from Dickens' book. This is the tentative conclusion reached by Evelyn Juers in her 2012 book "The Recluse", the most thorough recent investigation of the story. Opera: "Miss Donnithorne's Maggot" is an operatic work, with music by Peter Maxwell Davies and text by
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