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
Mary Dickens to have embarrassed or angered her family, who largely cut themselves off from her. Much of her life after her father's death in 1870 remains unknown, but after leaving her aunt's she lived for a period with a clergyman and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, in Manchester, a "scandal" which was kept a secret by her family. Later she lived alone in the country. Mary Dickens went on to write "My Father as I Recall Him" (1886), and a novel, "Cross Currents" (1890). On Mary's death her aunt, Georgina Hogarth, wrote to Connie Dickens, the widow of Edward Dickens: