Charles Dickens 'rhetorical exuberance': Harold Skimpole in "Bleak House" is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognised 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
Letters of Charles Dickens more intimate than any biography", and the critic Nicholas Lezard recommended it in the "Guardian" with the words, "The whole book bursts with the author’s energy, and you will love him and know him better after reading even a few of these letters." Also in 2012, a 4-hour audiobook was issued by Naxos under the title "Charles Dickens: A Portrait in Letters", the readers being David Timson and Simon Callow. One reviewer wrote that they "create myriad personalities with varying accents, tones, class distinctions, and personal idiosyncrasies that are nearly flawless". Letters of Charles Dickens The letters of Charles Dickens,