How do Charles Dickens with Hard Times, Sue Townsend with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, and Charlotte Brontë with Jane Eyre, portray childhood?

Childhood. A word that conjures up many images. The most frequent of which being the clichéd sight of a happy and energetic youngster running or playing joyfully with his friends. However childhood is not always the perfect, playful paradise that many people seem to remember. Throughout time and the world, most people have led very different childhoods. Some happy, some not so happy, and some nightmarish. Many writers have picked up on this and so childhood has become one of the most common themes in novels throughout the last 200 years.
Novelists have written many varied accounts of the experience of childhood over the years, and I am going to analyse three novels from different time periods. The three novels are all written in very different ways and all show childhood in varied and diverse manners.
Like many of Dickens' novels, "Hard Times" puts the societal problems of his day on trial. In this work, the problems Dickens scrutinises are those of the poverty-ridden, dehumanising ...