... within the class system could be reconciled with authentic desire and with moral feeling. This conflict in the lives of men, often with autobiographical reference, is played out in Dickens' David Copperfield (1849-1850), Thackeray's Pendennis (1848-1850), and Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895). Like all forms of Victorian fiction, the Bildungsroman must be classified by gender, for this was the age ... oppression, when he was forced to end school in early teens and work in a factory. Dickens's good, bad, and comic characters, such as the cruel miser Scrooge, the aspiring novelist David Cop...

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