Justus D. Barnes Peggotty in "David Copperfield", the earliest known film adaption of the 1850 novel by Charles Dickens. He also played supporting roles in "Nicholas Nickleby" (1912), "Aurora Floyd" (1912), and "A Dog of Flanders" (1914). In 1917, he was released from the Thanhouser Company due to the company's financial issues. Barnes made his final onscreen appearance for the Edison Studio in "Cy Whittaker's Ward", in 1917. After retiring from acting, Barnes moved to Weedsport, New York where he worked as a milkman. He later owned a cigar store. Barnes died on February 6, 1946 in Weedsport at the age of 83.
Racism in the work of Charles Dickens film Polanski has given the story a personal dimension that renders it irreproachably universal." Dickens's attitudes towards African Americans were also complex. In "American Notes" he fiercely opposed the inhumanity of slavery in the United States, and expressed a desire for African American emancipation. However, Grace Moore has noted how in the same work, he includes a comic episode with a black coach driver, presenting a grotesque description focused on the man's dark complexion and way of movement, which to Dickens amounts to an "insane imitation of an English coachman". In 1868, in a letter alluding to the then-uneducated condition