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Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness, by John R. Reed; pp. xvi + 504. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995, $29.95 paper.
"THACKERAY and DICKENS, Dickens and Thackeray-the two names now almost necessarily go together," David Masson wrote at the beginning of his long essay on David Copperfield and Pendennis in the May 1851 North British Review (15: 57), at a time when both novelists were in mid-career. Pursuing a variety of strategies and goals, critics have gone on linking the two men and their works over the past century and a half, and so John Reed's generous book is carrying forward an old tradition.
Reed's approach, however, is new. It is his purpose, he announces in his Preface, to concentrate on the "themes" of punishment and forgiveness in the fiction of the two writers, because of his conviction that "the way strongly held beliefs aboutwhat punishment and forgiveness involve determine the ways in which stories can be told." Moreover, he sees himself as "reasserting what some feel to be a discredited humanistic approach to literature" in treating "literary texts" as outgrowths of "a generative human intellect and spirit," "expressions of unique imaginative sources with their own imaginative methods" (xiv).
The first of Dickens and Thackeray's three parts is designed to provide the context in which the second and third are to be regarded: its three copiously documented chapters examine how the concepts of punishment and forgiveness were articulated during the nineteenth century in moral and especially...