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
Catherine Dickens death is fictionalised as the death of Little Nell. Catherine's younger sister, Georgina Hogarth, joined the Dickens fam household in 1842 when Dickens and Catherine sailed to America, caring for the young family they had left behind. In 1845 Charles Dickens produced the amateur theatrical "Every Man in his Humour" for the benefit of Leigh Hunt. In a subsequent performance, Catherine Dickens, who had a minor role, fell through a trap door injuring her ankle. In 1851, as 'Lady Maria Clutterbuck', Catherine Dickens published a cookery book, "What Shall we Have for Dinner? Satisfactorily Answered by Numerous Bills of Fare