Harry Lloyd a great-great-great-grandson of Victorian writer Charles Dickens through his mother, who is the daughter of Captain Peter Dickens, RN. One of his maternal great-grandfathers was Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove. He is a cousin of biographer and writer Lucinda Hawksley, and actor and performer Gerald Dickens. Lloyd was educated at Eton College and, while there, made his television debut at the age of 16 as James Steerforth in the BBC's 1999 adaptation of "David Copperfield" opposite Daniel Radcliffe. In 2002, he was cast as young Rivers in "Goodbye Mr Chips". He went on to study English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he
Charles Dickens Chesterton stated, "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", arguing that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens's grief, his "despotic" use of people's feelings to move them to tears in works like this. The question as to whether Dickens belongs to the tradition of the sentimental novel is debatable. Valerie Purton, in her recent "Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition", sees him continuing aspects of this tradition, and argues that his "sentimental scenes and characters [are] as crucial to