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
Dickens' Women Dickens' Women Dickens' Women is a one person show written by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser and starring Margolyes. The play includes 23 different characters (male and female) based on or inspired by characters in Charles Dickens' novels. The "Sydney Morning Herald" wrote that the "elegantly crafted production puts the focus on the storyteller" (Dickens), highlighting his "obsession with youthful beauty and his baffling relationships with his sisters-in-law". "The Age" noted that it "combines character sketches, short readings, biographical material and mordant commentary". The show was developed in 1989 for the Edinburgh Festival, and Margolyes has taken it on tour