Characters and Autobiographical elements

 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.