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Morbidity in Fairyland: Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and the Rhetoric of Abolition
- Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 9, Number 2, June 2011
- pp. 233-251
- 10.1353/pan.2011.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
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The article argues that Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby contains a number of elements taken from Frances Trollope's anti-slavery novel Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Life of the Mississippi. In detaching Trollope's images and language from the setting of plantation culture, Dickens creates a story that is permeated with the feelings of abolitionist literature without being tied to a single political aim.