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 stated that reading Dickens, especially "A Christmas Carol", was one of the things that was keeping him from committing suicide. Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, while admiring his gift for caricature. His late contemporary William Wordsworth, by then Poet laureate, thought him a "very talkative, vulgar young person", adding he had not read a line of his work; Dickens in return thought Wordsworth "a dreadful Old Ass". Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth and the novels, "loose baggy monsters", betrayed