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 Francis Dickens Francis Jeffrey Dickens (15 January 1844 – 11 June 1886) was the third son and fifth child of Victorian English novelist Charles Dickens and his wife Catherine Dickens née Hogarth. Francis Dickens was nicknamed "Chickenstalker" by his father after the character Mrs. Chickenstalker in the Christmas book "The Chimes" that he was writing at the time of Francis's birth; however he came to be called Frank by those who knew him. He was born in England and went to school in Germany to train to become a doctor. Giving up this ambition, he obtained a commission in the