Stylistic device Similar to 'personification' but direct. The speaker addresses someone absent or dead, or addresses an inanimate or abstract object as if it were human. This is when the name of a character has a symbolic meaning. For example, in Dickens' "Great Expectations", Miss Havisham has a sham, or lives a life full of pretense. In Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", Rev. Dimmesdale metaphorically fades away (dims) as the novel progresses, while Chillingworth has a cold (chilled) heart. A symbol may be an object, a person, a situation, an action, a word, or an idea that has literal meaning in the story
The Last Dickens The Last Dickens The Last Dickens is a novel by Matthew Pearl published by Random House. It is a work of historical and literary fiction. The novel is a Washington Post Critics' Pick. It contains some characters from "The Dante Club". The novel is set in the United States, England, and India in 1867 and 1870. When news of Charles Dickens’s untimely death reaches the office of his struggling American publisher, Fields & Osgood, partner James R. Osgood sends his trusted clerk Daniel Sand to await Dickens’s unfinished last novel – "The Mystery of Edwin Drood". But when Daniel’s body