<P> Dickens's serialisation of his novels was not uncriticised by other authors . In Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, there is a comment by Captain Nares, investigating an abandoned ship: "See! They were writing up the log," said Nares, pointing to the ink - bottle . "Caught napping, as usual . I wonder if there ever was a captain yet that lost a ship with his log - book up to date? He generally has about a month to fill up on a clean break, like Charles Dickens and his serial novels ." </P> <P> Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary . He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society . In a New York address, he expressed his belief that "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen". Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it challenged middle class polemics about criminals, making impossible any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed . </P> <P> Dickens is often described as using idealised characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals . The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde . "You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of little Nell ." G.K. Chesterton, stated: "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this . </P> <P> The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable . Valerie Purton, in her recent Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition, sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters (are) as crucial to the overall power of the novels as his darker or comic figures and scenes", and that "Dombey and Son is (...) Dickens's greatest triumph in the sentimentalist tradition". The Encyclopædia Britannica online comments that, despite "patches of emotional excess", such as the reported death of Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843), "Dickens cannot really be termed a sentimental novelist". </P>

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