Dicken's and Wright Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Dicken's and Wright - Essay Example ld, hard facts in numerous treatises and injunctions that would have few readers and fewer active responders, Dickens opted to include these details within his fictional stories while Wright opted to present his own autobiography in story form. In approaching the subjects in this way, these authors engaged readers’ hearts, minds and souls in the issues of the day. This method, referred to as realism, was quite effective in making the public more aware of the problems still to be overcome in London and elsewhere in a modernizing society. While Dickens concentrated on life in England’s cities, Wright attempted to demonstrate the conditions under which millions of black people were forced to live in the Jim Crow era of the American South. Both Charles Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop and Richard Wright’s The Ethics of Living Jim Crow are effective in demonstrating how realism can establish the case for social change. The tragedy of the Old Curiosity Shop is that Nell Trent and her grandfather are unable to break out of the poverty of their lives and suffer wasting death as a result. Examining an excerpt from the 45th chapter of the book illustrates how the narrative provides grisly details of the life of the masses as they existed beneath or behind the glitz of the new machinery and wealth of the age. In this chapter, Nell and her grandfather are seen to walk through a ‘dismal town’ characterized by ‘shrinking leaves’ and ‘rank flowers’ to give an overall impression of the town as ‘blighting and unwholesome’ (83). Rather than having the excitement and promise typically associated with moving to a new place, Nell and her grandfather experience â€Å"the dark, depressing influence stale upon their spirits† and feel the weight of their poverty and struggle (83). Through his use of imagery and sensual description of the dirty industrial town described in this chapter, Dickens enables his readers to almost feel the realty of the polluted