Published: 1
From the pages of novels such as
Oliver Twist, Dickens savaged the injustices meted out to the impoverished – and at the top of his hit-list was the infamous New Poor Law
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“Please, Sir, I want some more.” Charles Dickens’ portrayal of Oliver Twist approaching the master and asking him, timorously, for a second helping of gruel is surely one of the most famous scenes in all of 19th-century literature.
When Dickens wrote these words in the 1830s, huge celebrity and vast fortune still lay in the future. Instead the author was thinking of the here and now – in particular, the plight of the most impoverished Britons. Dickens was determined to savage the terrible injustices he saw unfolding around him, and did that so effectively that he soon secured a reputation as a spokesman for the poor.
Joseph Conrad published his novel
The Secret Agent in weekly installments from 1906 to 1907. Its plot revolves around an attempt to destroy, with dynamite, the Greenwich Observatory. Although Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber was a wide-ranging reader, he was known to have read Conrad repeatedly, and the parallels between
The Secret Agent and Kaczynski’s own life prompted the FBI to contact Conrad scholars in an attempt to better understand his campaign of mail-bomb terror.
Stranger in a Strange Land
Penguin Group USA
The Heinlein Society insists that it isn’t true. Charles Manson is said to have denied having read the book. Yet claimed connections between Manson’s Family and Robert Heinlein’s novel