The Blacking Factory (and) Pennsylvania Gothic

When Charles Dickens was twelve, his father was made bankrupt and young Charles was taken abruptly from school and set to work in a blacking factory. This experience was so traumatic that he could not bring himself to mention it in later life.The two short novels in this book both deal with the hold the past can have on the future. In The Blacking Factory the boy's hell is an austere British public school and the trauma is the effect of this alien society on a sensitive American adolescent. In Pennsylvania Gothic it is the sinister ethos of death in a pre-war New England town which threatens the boy's security...and his future.