This thesis, focusing on Dickens' early work ('Our Parish'to The Old Curiosity Shop), explorers the nature and fictional expression of the author's faith and the historical ecclesiastical elements of his writing. Dickens passionately believed that the Church was failing in its Christian responsibility to the poor. Contrary to contemporary religious thought, he neither accepted that the appalling depravation endured by the poor esulted from their personal sin, or that the imperative of spiritual redemption negated the Church's responsibility to ease their physical distress. He also realised that among his predominately London-based middle-class readership there was genuine ignorance of the reality of the suffering endured by the poor. In his early fiction Dickens used a two stage approach to communicate his personal beliefs about the poor. The first, adopted in 'Our Parish' and the first seven chapters of Oliver Twist, involved the graphic description of the suffering endured by the poor and the exposure of the inadequacies of the parochial system upon which they depended. Next, Dickens introduces his readers to a series of characters who embody his perception of Christian charity. Mr Pickwick, Mr brownlow and Charles Cheeryble (collectively referred to in this thesis as 'Charitable Angels')are, contrary to parochial officials and those who participate in charitable activity for their own selfish ends, shown to make a difference in the lives of those they assist. Dickens hoped that his readers would be inspired to emulate their actions.

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<p>The purpose of the essay is to illustrate the differences in understanding and comprehension of time among the characters in the novel Hard Times. These contrasting differences are then argued to compose a crtisism of the industrial society.</p>

The purpose of the essay is to illustrate the differences in understanding and comprehension of time among the characters in the novel Hard Times. These contrasting differences are then argued to compose a crtisism of the industrial society.

This thesis examines the feminine coming-of-age stories in The Mill on the Floss and Hard Times and seeks to redefine coming-of-age for Victorian girls as a movement into personal agency. The traditional bildungsroman has been defined in a way that largely excludes the experiences and stories of girls born during the early nineteenth century. Because these girls lacked the options and choices of their male counterparts, it becomes important to redefine what coming-of-age means when there are limited opportunities for personal growth. The middle-class Victorian woman led a largely prescribed existence and her well-being and security was often directly and indirectly tied to the status and conduct of the men in her life, usually her father. Given this, this paper also explores the father’s role in his daughter’s coming-of-age story and how he influences the choices she makes in her life.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Freie Universität Berlin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-330).

Th. Ph. D.--English literature--University of London, 1990?

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Freie Universität Berlin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 319-330).

This dissertation tracks the automaton’s appearance in Victorian literature from 1840 to 1900. It shows how authors across genre, form, and time conceptualized and responded to the Machine Age, using the automaton as a symbol of humanity’s changing relationship to machine technologies. Chapters 1 and 5 trace how Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and E.E. Kellett’s “The New Frankenstein” (1900) similarly address concerns about gender equality in Victorian Britain, challenging the assumption that women could themselves be classified, and controlled, as talking/reproducing automata. Chapter 2 argues that Dickens’s conceptualization of the human machine in Our Mutual Friend (1865) allows his working-class characters a degree of class mobility outside of bourgeois object-oriented ontologies. The automaton informs Dickens’s commentary on Victorian class. Chapter 3 reads The Coming Race (1871) as a reactionary response to what Bulwer-Lytton perceived as the machine’s potential to liberate women from the domestic sphere. In this dystopic vision, women would necessarily come to control all aspects of society when freed of housework by the machine. Chapter 4 looks at Scots working-class poet Alexander Anderson’s 1878 collection Songs of the Rail. Anderson lauds the train engine as savoir and prophet of a coming technological age. I argue that he creates a literary aesthetics for that age by anthropomorphizing the steam engine, extending to it his own poetic voice.

Over the past seventy-five years, television and, of all holidays, Christmas have functioned as staples of civilization in the United States. Despite vast social changes, neither has lost cultural staying power. In the 21st century, the two discursive systems continue to organize and regulate time and experience. The linkages between Christmas and television are central to understanding how and why America’s media landscape changes, yet never quite transforms into something new.My dissertation emerges from the observation that television viewers of the 21st century more frequently access content via streaming services, and that on these platforms, there has been a considerable decrease in the number of new episodes of serialized television that focus on Christmas. And yet, Christmas persists, particularly in the way streaming services re-play and re-use the literary, cinematic, and televisual legacy that constructed what I term the “calendrical experience” of American social life. Both Christmas and television rely heavily on this calendrical experience through collective narratives consumed together as a nation, whether that be together in the same place at the same time, or individually and yet still simultaneously. Using textual, economic, and industrial analytic tools, I explore the evolution of television’s depiction of Christmas via close readings of how media companies released, and people in the United States viewed, specific episodes. Christmas serves as my interpretive lens through which to understand television’s ever transforming, yet persistent and central role in the United States over the past seventy-five years.