Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and ForgivenessAttitudes toward punishment and forgiveness in English society of the nineteenth century came, for the most part, out of Christianity. In actual experience the ideal was not often met, but in the literature of the time the model was important. For novelists attempting to tell exciting and dramatic stories, violent and criminal activities played an important role, and, according to convention, had to be corrected through poetic justice or human punishment. Both Dickens' and Thackeray's novels subscribed to the ideal, but dealt with the dilemma it presented in slightly different ways. At a time when a great deal of attention has been directed toward economic production and consumption as the bases for value, Reed's well-documented study reviving moral belief as a legitimate concern for the analysis of nineteenth-century English texts is particularly illuminating. |
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... Allegory in Dickens ( University , AL : The University of Ala- bama Press , 1977 ) and Janet L. Larson's Dickens and the Broken Scripture ( Athens : The University of Georgia Press , 1985 ) are two works that deal with ironic uses of ...
... allegorical manner in Tale and in The French Revolution in The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities ( London : Unwin Hyman , 1988 ) , 109. J. M. Rignall regards these parallel carriage scenes as signifying an escape from history and from ...
... Allegory in Dickens . University , AL : The University of Alabama Press , 1977 . von Hirsch , A. Doing Justice : The Choice of Punishments : Report of the Committee for the Study of Incarceration . New York : Hill and Wang , 1976 ...
Contents
Attitudes Toward Punishment and Forgiveness | 3 |
Some of the contents of this study appeared elsewhere in different form Mate | 28 |
Education | 30 |
Copyright | |
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