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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... human heart from its divine father - the going away of the son from the father . It also teaches the unsatisfying nature of human happiness . And most certainly it teaches the readiness of forgiveness to the truly repentant . Moreover ...
... human justice is likely to be uniform , magiste- rial , and honorable aside , there are many objections to likening human to divine justice . R. W. Dale , writing later in the century , explained that there is a sub- stantial and ...
... human activities in Dickens ' code is to treat human beings as commodities . In one of his most powerful metaphors , the narrator of Nicholas Nickleby indicates early in the novel that human beings are the currency of eternal values ...
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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