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So, Charles Dickens was more radical -- and saucy -- than we've previously imagined, was he!?

This from the Telegraph:

Pip and Herbert from Great Expectations are among those who really have homosexual leanings, the study by Dr Holly Furneaux of Leicester University claimed.

Often Dickens' male characters "conveniently" fall in love with the sister of their best friend, which she read as further evidence that he had woven the suggestion of homosexual relationships into his plots.

She said there were a "raft of prejudices" about supposedly strait-laced Victorians and Dickens in particular that stopped such writing being seen for what she thought it was.

"We have positioned him as this figure of respectability," said Dr Furneaux, a lecturer in Victorian Studies.

But rather than being a writer interested in "hearth and home" and the nuclear family, he was interested in all sorts of sexual relationships, she said (more...)