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
Unreliable narrator in her 1967 novel "Endless Night". The same technique was employed (baldly) in William Makepeace Thackeray's 1847–8 serial and novel "Vanity Fair"—one of the few examples of an unreliable authorial narrator in the English novel—where he admits passing over the worst of Becky's misdeeds in silence while providing enough allusions and clues (including in the content and captions of the illustrations, also done by Thackeray) to show the way to those interested in them; even their accuracy, however, is made dubious by his admission that he learned the story second-hand from the diplomat Tapeworm. The Norwegian crime writer Sven Elvestad's