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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... narrator of the tale , even to the degree that he is supposed to be Master Humphrey , the orig- inal first - person narrator.10 The narrator must superintend the opposition of good and evil characters in the story , resulting in an ...
... narrator's positioning relative to his subject . Pen passes through his first trial scarred , educated , but ... narrator has Pen's verses before him . Though the poems were unsuccessful in competition , Pen had them privately printed ...
... narrator's admission that Clive is selfish enough not to realize all that his father is doing for him . " Did we not ... narrator , and this is a familiar Christian assertion . But in order to disturb the self - righteous , who might ...
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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