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
Francis Dickens Rudy Wiebe. In recent decades, Francis Dickens has been depicted as a comic figure. In "W.G. Grace's Last Case" (1984), by William Rushton, in a fantastic plot that includes fictional characters like Jekyll and Hyde and Dr. Watson, Francis Dickens encounters Apache Indians and (anachronistically) meets the famed cricketer of the title during the latter's team's 1872 North American tour. Francis Dickens later was the subject of a comic novel by humorist Eric Nicol, "Dickens of the Mounted" (1989). The book is a series of fictional letters, a mock document purporting to be a record of Dickens's correspondence spanning his