Literary influence of Hamlet a production of "Hamlet" at its core but also dwells on parallels between the Ghost and Wilhelm Meister's dead father. In the early 1850s, in "", Herman Melville focuses on a Hamlet-like character's long development as a writer. Ten years later, Dickens' "Great Expectations" contains many Hamlet-like plot elements: it is driven by revenge actions, contains ghost-like characters (Abel Magwitch and Miss Havisham), and focuses on the hero's guilt. Academic Alexander Welsh notes that "Great Expectations" is an "autobiographical novel" and "anticipates psychoanalytic readings of "Hamlet" itself". About the same time, George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss" was published,
Mary Dickens to have embarrassed or angered her family, who largely cut themselves off from her. Much of her life after her father's death in 1870 remains unknown, but after leaving her aunt's she lived for a period with a clergyman and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hargreaves, in Manchester, a "scandal" which was kept a secret by her family. Later she lived alone in the country. Mary Dickens went on to write "My Father as I Recall Him" (1886), and a novel, "Cross Currents" (1890). On Mary's death her aunt, Georgina Hogarth, wrote to Connie Dickens, the widow of Edward Dickens: