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
Charles Dickens In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club. In June 1862, he was offered £10,000 for a reading tour of Australia. He was enthusiastic, and even planned a travel book, "The Uncommercial Traveller Upside Down", but ultimately decided against the tour. Two of his sons, Alfred D'Orsay Tennyson Dickens and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, migrated to Australia, Edward becoming a member of the Parliament of New South Wales as Member for Wilcannia between 1889 and 1894. On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ellen Ternan,