missions and missionaries Reference library
Leon Litvack
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...and hypocrisy, and it called forth such satirical portraits as Mrs Jellyby and Mrs Pardiggle in Bleak House , as well as a poignant indictment of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, whose doorstep Jo sweeps, though he has ‘no idea, poor wretch, of the spiritual destitution of a coral reef in the Pacific’ ( BH 16). Such portrayals of excessive—and misdirected— religious enthusiasm may be found throughout Dickens's oeuvre, from the ‘distributionist’ Mrs Johnson Parker in ‘The Ladies' Societies’ ( SB ) to the...
charity and Dickens Reference library
Norris Pope
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...odium on the pastors of the underprivileged sects, and on the enterprises of world-wide philanthropy which form one of the chief glories of the age in which we live’ ( December 1853 ). Mrs Pardiggle , again in Bleak House , shows that Dickens's objections to offensive and self-serving philanthropy were by no means confined to dissenters. Clearly an Anglican, Mrs Pardiggle is distinguished by her ‘rapacious benevolence’ and her self-appointed role as an ‘inexorable moral policeman’—intrusive bullying that shows how far removed she is from any genuine...
Church of England Reference library
Robert Newsom
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...Affairs of Mr John Bull’, originally written for Household Words in 1850 on the occasion of the scare over ‘Papal Aggression’, and reprinted in Journalism 2). A more temperate but still strong attack against conservative Anglicanism appears in Dickens's portrayal of Mrs Pardiggle in Bleak House ; her allegiance is signalled by the fact that her children bear the names of saints of the early English Church revered by the Oxford Movement ( BH 8). The figure of Bishop in Little Dorrit (1.21) is notable chiefly for the absence of anything identifiably...
clothing Reference library
Penelope Byrde
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...) wear ‘scanty’ dresses which suggest the narrow skirts of their youth, rather than the more fashionable bell shape of the 1840s and 1850s, when Mrs Pardiggle 's skirt is so wide it knocks down little chairs ( BH 8). Dickens's heroines, as ideal women of their period, express their ladylike qualities in neat, quiet, and unassuming dress. This was the convention for young, unmarried girls. Married women like Mrs Merdle ( LD 1.21) could wear precious jewellery and rich, expensive clothes, in effect as a showcase for a husband's wealth and status. When ...
Carlyle, Thomas (1795–1881) Reference library
Robert Newsom
The Oxford Reader's Companion to Dickens
...Bleak House 's Esther Summerson adopts just such an ethics when she proposes to let the immediate domestic ‘circle of duty gradually and naturally expand itself’ ( BH 8) rather than follow the forced and mechanical prescriptions of the professional philanthropists like Mrs Pardiggle and Mrs Jellyby , who have lots of theories but no organic connection with the people they aim to help. Robert Newsom Goldberg, Michael K. , Carlyle and Dickens (1972). Oddie, William , Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (1972)....
Dickens, Charles Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
...in Hard Times . This system of inversions normalizes middle-class gender roles while rendering somewhat suspect whatever agency Dickens's “good” working-class women assume. His narratives also harshly punish socially or politically active middle-class women, such as Mrs. Jellyby and Mrs. Pardiggle of Bleak House . Dickensian women who fail to meet the angelic ideal often function as helpers in the narrative of male desire. David Copperfield's autobiographical story gradually tames his “undisciplined heart,” for example, through the sequence of his romantic...
