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
Letters of Charles Dickens Pilgrim volumes, and the fragmentary or routine business nature of many of the letters included, has encouraged the publication of selections of Dickens's letters, intended for the general reader rather than the scholar. In 1985 David Paroissien edited "The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens", taking his texts from the Nonesuch Edition, substantive textual variants from the first five volumes of the Pilgrim Edition (the only ones then published) being listed in the notes. The scholar John Espey wrote that this selection constitutes "a full review of almost all that we know of Dickens' activities as editor, public figure, father, husband,