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
The Last Dickens The Last Dickens The Last Dickens is a novel by Matthew Pearl published by Random House. It is a work of historical and literary fiction. The novel is a Washington Post Critics' Pick. It contains some characters from "The Dante Club". The novel is set in the United States, England, and India in 1867 and 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James R. Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await Dickens’s unfinished last novel – "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". But when Daniel’s body