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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... characters , before concluding with the eventual fortunes of the good characters . The narrator explains that Arthur Gride managed to elude justice concerning unlawful possession of the will that named Madeline heir to a small fortune ...
... characters ; we generally have no dif- ficulty distinguishing the good from the bad . In Our Mutual Friend , for example , he dismisses much of the waterside population as the " scum of humanity " and " moral sewage , " and bluntly ...
... characters , how much more do elaborated characters obliterate the schemata of plots as , in their representa- tions of human psychology , they more and more blur the simple moral outlines originating in fable or parable . Thackeray ...
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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