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' London Dickens' London Charles Dickens' works are especially associated with London which is the setting for many of his novels. These works do not just use London as a backdrop but are about the city and its character. Dickens described London as a Magic lantern, a popular entertainment of the Victorian era, which projected images from slides. Of all Dickens' characters 'none played as important a role in his work as that of London itself', it fired his imagination and made him write. In a letter to John Forster, in 1846, Dickens wrote 'a day in London sets me up and