Separation In Uncle Tom's Cabin

Sentimental writers in the 18th century focused on moving people’s emotions through their work. Authors focused on scenes of ultimate despair or tender bonds to get their point across the pages. Some authors used the lack of sentiment in their novels as well to relay a life devoid of strong emotion. Bleak House by Charles Dickens is famous for its sentimental quality through the all-encompassing list of characters and detailed imagery. He is able to aptly tune into his reader's emotions using a double narrative and the family as a main source of sentiment. Similarly, Harriet Beecher Stowe in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin successfully uses sentiment illustrating the separation and reuniting of the family unit; however, her sentiment relies on religion to …show more content…
Specifically focusing on“Tom-All-Alone’s” in chapter sixteen, Dickens switches from the delicate yet understanding Esther narrative to his own disembodied voice in the form of the omniscient narrative. Now Dickens previously explores the lives and homes of the upper class elite, the middle class, and the desperate poor; none of these can even compare in the sentiment that surrounds “Tom-All-Alone's”, its condition being even worse than the deadly brickmakers home. The graphic descriptions of poor Jo’s only home is definitely Dickens most stirring imagery, “It is a black dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people...a swarm of misery...Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust...each time a house has fallen”(Dickens 232-3). The home is not a home, it’s not even a house. The miserable slum turns into the description of a garbage dump as Dicken equates the inhabitants as maggots who breed and spread their evil through vice and disease. The place is so uninhabitable that the houses collapse onto themselves constantly since they lack foundation, physically and morally. Jo lives, or “Jo has not yet died”, he has no family and therefore no foundation and certainly