Osborne's satire was so bitter and biting that at one point he received a public censure from Parliament's then Home Secretary Sir James Graham. Osborne wrote mostly in the Juvenalian mode over a wide range of topics mostly centered on British government's and landlords' mistreatment of poor farm workers and field laborers. He bitterly opposed the New Poor Laws and was passionate on the subject of the British government's botched response to the Great Irish Famine and the mistreatment of British soldiers during the Crimean War. A number of works of fiction during this time, influenced by Egyptomania, used the backdrop of Ancient Egypt as a device for satire. Some works, like Edgar Allan Poe's Some Words with a Mummy (1845) and Grant Allen's My New Year's Eve Among the Mummies (1878), portrayed Egyptian civilization as having already achieved many of the Victorian era's advancements (like the steam engine and gaslamps) in an effort to satire the notion of progress. Other works, like Jane Loudon's The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, satirized Victorian curiosities with the afterlife. Later in the nineteenth century, in the United States, Mark Twain (1835–1910) grew to become American's greatest satirist: his novel Huckleberry Finn (1884) is set in the antebellum South, where the moral values Twain wishes to promote are completely turned on their heads. His hero, Huck, is a rather simple but goodhearted lad who is ashamed of the "sinful temptation" that leads him to help a fugitive slave. In fact his conscience, warped by the distorted moral world he has grown up in, often bothers him most when he is at his best. He is prepared to do good, believing it to be wrong. Twain's younger contemporary Ambrose Bierce (1842–1913) gained notoriety as a cynic, pessimist and black humorist with his dark, bitterly ironic stories, many set during the American Civil War, which satirized the limitations of human perception and reason. Bierce's most famous work of satire is probably The Devil's Dictionary (1906), in which the definitions mock cant, hypocrisy and received wisdom. 20th-century satire Karl Kraus is considered the first major European satirist since Jonathan Swift. In 20th-century literature, satire was used by English authors such as Aldous Huxley (1930s) and George Orwell (1940s), which under the inspiration of Zamyatin's Russian 1921 novel We, made serious and even frightening commentaries on the dangers of the sweeping social changes taking