Children’s Death in Dickens: a Chapter in the History of Taste

Abstract

In the constantly shifting history of literary taste we sometimes recognize unusually violent fluctuations. Late Victorian intellectuals would have been surprised how little their successors think of Meredith, while a whole phase of literary and social history might be discovered in the critical judgments made of D.H. Lawrence in the last seventy-five years. The whole work of Dickens provides an example; and, within this, the way readers have responded to his portrayal of children, and especially to the death scenes.