Ashish Gupta

Charles Dickens a prolific, literary figure of Victorian era. Before Dickens, no novelist had treated the lower middle classes so widely or so frankly. He tests them on their own occasions rather than as a detached superior form examined. Dickens' readings from his own works demonstrate plainly how he tried to fulfill not just his own personal desires in his novels but also to bear witness to their effect directly on his viewers. In the novel, Oliver Twist, Dickens builds a plot centered on the boy's encounter with an ungrateful reality. Throughout the ages, literature in its variegated form has spoken of several social, political, economic, physical and psychological issues. Exploitation of children thus refers to unfair treatment meted out to children for any benefit. Exploitation of children includes using children for servitude through physical labor or personal, sexual gratification. Children also suffer from psychological exploitation, when they have to pass through difficult phases either in school or at home. They even suffer from social exploitation through racial discrimination or gender bias.

Shobha was a cute girl in possession of a finely chiselled face, laced with the cutest of smiles. What made her unique, apart from her beauty, was her eagerness to help others just like her father, a reputed businessman of the town. Being the only child of her parents, she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Shobha had just to think of something and the next moment it was hers. She received love from everyone. Life seemed rosy and full of happiness, but future had something else written for her.......

Indian English literature has developed over a period of time and writing in English did not start in a day. It took many years. Indian women novelists have given a new dimension to it. The study is based on the women's basic problems of survival and existence which have discovered new ways to counter the various forms of oppression meted to women in a male dominated society. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a world class fictionist and storyteller of the present century, has distinctive achievements as a literary artist. Jhabvala also chronicled a distinctive phase in encounters between Indians and Westerners, as a last generation of imperial Britons trickled away and new customs, new tastes, and new people (increasingly American) stepped in. She deals with the situation of breakdown of a traditional social order thereby highlighting the alienation or isolation between one individual and another in marital relations, in family life, in the society at large. The theme of fancy & frustration is compellingly dealt with her novel The Householder, wherein the women characters are central figures.