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
The Female American 1719 novel "Robinson Crusoe". Although there are many similarities to Defoe's novel, the differences are what make "The Female American" distinctive. For instance, the narrator is not only a woman but is also biracial, as the daughter of a Native American princess and an English settler who resided in Virginia. The protagonist is also multilingual. Although Defoe's protagonist (Robinson Crusoe) chooses to leave his home and set out into an unexplored and dangerous life abroad, Winkfield's protagonist's (Unca Eliza Winkfield) trials and adventures are forced upon her. It is only in the latter part of the narrative that the female