Critical opinion on the value of Dickens's novels has shifted significantly between his time and the present. The enormous success of his first work, Pickwick Papers, set a pattern in which his most admired novels were those which seemed to contemporaries to operate within a mode of celebratory comedy. This is not to say that Dickens's first readers did not appreciate the elements of satire and social criticism in his work, but they preferred the novels in which these qualities did not seem to predominate. H…
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1953 words
Citation: Smith, Grahame. "Little Dorrit". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 March 2001 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3937, accessed 26 November 2024.]
