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
All American Boy (novel) All American Boy (novel) All American Boy is a novel by William J. Mann. Fourteen-year-old Walter (Wally) Day was a good son, the smartest boy in his class, an archetypal "all-American boy" growing up in the 1970s. Twenty years later, Wally’s mother, whom he has not seen in ten years, asks him to come home and Wally, now a handsome actor, has to confront the reasons he left his hometown of Brown's Mill in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt. Wally is in denial, denial about his failing career as an actor and denial about the rent-boys he uses.