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
Elizabeth Dickens to be got up in sables like a female Hamlet, illumines the dreary scene with a ghastly absurdity that is the chief relief I can find in it." In her last years she became increasingly like Charles' portrait of her as Nicholas Nickelby's mother. Charles hired Alfred's widow to mind and take care of his mother. Elizabeth Dickens died on 13 September 1863. At that time she was described as "hopelessly senile". She is buried with her husband in Highgate Cemetery. For her gravestone her son Charles Dickens wrote the dispassionate epitaph "HERE ALSO LIE THE REMAINS OF ELIZABETH DICKENS