Oliver Twist The alternative title, "The Parish Boy's Progress", alludes to Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress", as well as the 18th-century caricature series by William Hogarth, "A Rake's Progress" and "A Harlot's Progress". In this early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises the hypocrisies of his time, including child labour, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own youthful experiences
Boy (novel) 3's "Sunday Play" on March 16, 1996. "The New York Times", in Hanley's "Obituary", described "Boy" as "Mr. Hanley's partly autobiographical novel". However, Hanley did not run away to sea when he was thirteen but worked as a clerk for four years, before signing on as an ordinary seaman on the SS Nitonian, when he was seventeen. According to Hanley's son Liam, his father laughed at the suggestion that "Boy" was autobiographical. Hanley refers to "Boy", though not naming it, in "a short reminiscence entitled 'Oddfish', " in his collection of essays and sketches "Don Quixote Drowned" (1953). In this