Oliver Twist | Oliver Twist and the Contours of Early Victorian England
In the following essay, this author examines Oliver Twist as a reflection of English society and its changing environment during Dickens's formative years.
Readers familiar with literature about Britain written during the interval between Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 and the coronation of Queen Victoria twenty-two years later know how rich it is in studies that map the distinctive features of the postwar period. Some writers, like Bulwer Lytton in his England and the English (1833), mixed sociology and history in order to analyze society in the manner of De Toqueville and Montesquieu. Others—David Ricardo, Sismondi, the Swiss economist and historian, and Patrick Colquhoun, are examples—focused more specifically on the best...
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