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
The Virgins (novel) "A Sport and a Pastime"—a male narrator tells the story of a romance in which he doesn't take part. That narrator describes encounters and events he couldn't possibly have been a witness to. Suddenly I knew that was what I wanted to do with my own novel." In an article for her UK publisher, Erens identified five novels which "helped me feel that the task of writing about teens and sex was an achievable one": John Irving (like Erens a past student at Phillps Exeter) writing in "The New York Times" praises the characterization of the narrator: "He's a villain