He takes us from the drunken old woman to the dying mother to the hardened doctor. ... In this first chapter, Dickens also captures life and death in a single sentence, "Let me see the child, and die." ... We are apt to forget how early-Victorian society, the society of the laissez-faire, took for granted individual conditions of privacy and isolation...It was a society where each unit, each family and household, led their secret lives with an almost neurotic antipathy to external interference (Price, 90-91). ... Acting, indeed, as Dickens implies in his facetious but revealing preamble to Cha...

• Word Count: 1649
• Approx Pages: 7
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School