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
Unreliable narrator by Vladimir Nabokov. Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of Nabokov's "Lolita", often tells the story in such a way as to justify his hebephilia (fixation on young girls), in particular his sexual relationship with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. In Nabokov's "Pale Fire," the reliability, sanity and intentions of the narrator, Charles Kinbote, is one of the central themes of the novel. The narrator of A. M. Homes' "The End of Alice" deliberately withholds the full story of the crime that put him in prison—the rape and subsequent murder of a young girl—until the end of the novel. In some