Word: offing
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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To Wilson, Dickens' determination to write sprang from a fear of sinking back into oblivion and poverty. His disenchantment with his parents primed him for his eventual satire of the feckless, posturing stratum of society that they epitomized. Father, an expansive but hopelessly improvident clerk, was to balloon into...
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Dickens' feeling of being let down by his mother was the first of several jolts to his self-indulgent idealization of women. At 21 he tried to place a girl named Maria Beadnell in the role of an angelic object of worship. She ended by jilting him. Later he...
The forlorn, ill-fed Dickens who lodged alone during the blacking-factory days was the original of all the young innocents set wandering in his books-the Oliver Twists and David Copperfields and Pips. Through them, his evocations of childhood and the child's point of view are still...
Submerged Society. The teeming streets of London helped lend shape to Dickens' lifelong, horrified fascination with the submerged of Victorian society-the poor, the grotesque, especially the criminal. A long line of murderers stalk through Dickens' novels, from Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist to John Jasper in Edwin...