Characters
Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of
character in English fiction after Shakespeare.Dickensian characters, especially so because of their typically whimsical names, are amongst the
most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heepare so well known as to be part and parcel of British culture, and in some
cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser.
His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their
own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the
character Mrs Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all
entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who
were quixotic, hypocritical, or vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs
Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognize herself in the
portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his
father's 'rhetorical exuberance':Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognized herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Perhaps Dickens's impressions on his meeting with Hans
Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep.
Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography
when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in
detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet
extraordinarily revealing remarks."
One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London
itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of
the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of
work.
Autobiographical elements
An original illustration by Phiz from the novel "David Copperfield", widely regarded as
Dickens's most autobiographical work.
Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they have
known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded as strongly autobiographical. The scenes
in Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments reflect Dickens's
experiences as law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct
experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in
Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's father was sent to prison for debt, and this
became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life
in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from
Dickens's own experiences of the institution.Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart may have
affected several of Dickens's portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette
in A Tale of Two Cities.Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences,
but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he
gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his
early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a
biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Even figures based on real people
can, at the same time, represent at the same time elements of the writer's own
personality. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have
detected in his portrait features of Dickens's own character, which he sought
to exorcise by self-parody.
