Word: dickensian
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...Wilson Kipling even looked the part. Born in Bombay and brought up in India until six, he was "a swarthy boy with lank straight hair, who might almost pass for a Hindu." At that point his parents farmed him out to relatives in England, sadistic moralists after the Dickensian type who brutalized him until public school took over. The battered child became a lifelong hater who never quite managed to spit out all his venom...
Edward Pierce, master criminal, aims to snaffle ?12,000 in old bullion bound for the British troops in the Crimea. Playing between the parlors of the rich and the Dickensian dens of the criminal underworld, the aristocratic thief outwits crushers (cops), noses (informers) and Establishment nibs to assemble the four keys needed to grab the gold. By subversion, bribery and tricks far dirtier than the king's men ever dreamed of, the ringleader and his scruffy accomplices come within a sniff of the swag, only to meet their greatest obstacle: an obscure law of physics...
What possessed Shelley? Holmes has tried to find the answer by retracing a path trampled flat by idolaters. After a pampered, precocious childhood filled with adoring sisters, gothic novels and the promise of an inherited baronetcy, Shelley was thrust into a Dickensian boarding school. At Eton, his refusal to kowtow to senior students earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley." There followed University College, Oxford, which gratefully expelled young Percy Bysshe, after a scant six months, for writing a broadside on atheism...
...lost its place as the monarch of U.S. food retailing. He knew that A. & P.'s secretive, sometimes smug management had determinedly followed outmoded policies. It failed to invest in modern suburban supermarkets but held on to too many small, low-profit central city stores that seemed mustily Dickensian compared with the competition. So Scott won the board's preliminary approval to shut down fully one-third of the chain's 3,500 stores...
...Manhattan, the "Rothko case" has involved seven different teams of lawyers, produced more than 8,000 pages of transcript and run up a probable $500,000 in costs-and the case for the defense has not yet begun. From the plaintiffs' side, at least, the cast is Dickensian: the suicide artist, the wronged daughter, a brace of crooked or bungling trustees and a villain-Machiavelli and Scrooge McDuck rolled up in one banker's suit...