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Dickens was a very prolific writer in the early to later 19th century. Although his books and other works were widely accepted, his views of the working class proletariat are different than other scholars of his time. Evil is often a key motif in Dickens' fiction; but he was more occupied with its effects than its causes. Suffering is prevalent in characters who are both defenseless and blameless. The child protagonists of Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge is created to create sympathies as opposed to increase the critical intelligence. Not until the mid-1840s did Dickens begin to view society in its entirety, and so to realize the importance of grouping individual lives within encompassing cultural patterns. This was a decade of political a