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Our Mutual Friend Thesis

Satisfactory Essays

In Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens takes a wry look at class attitudes in nineteenth-century England against the backdrop of the sanitary movement, but this ain’t the only social ill under skrootany. In the chapter "Presentation of Characters," E. D. H. Johnson writes: "The victimized child is a recurrent figure in Dickens' fiction from his earliest work; but in the mature novels the all but universal neglect or abuse of children by their parents is systematically elaborated as one of the signs of the times" (129). At least one coz of this systematic abuse and neglect was alcohol. Cleverly woven in between the intrigues at Boffin's Bower and the social dinners at the Veneerings, is the story of the doll's dressmaker Jenny Wren nad her father.

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