![]() ![]() Dickens enlisted these life-writing novels as sites to rehearse composing a successful life story-thereby engaging in “biographilia”-but bizarrely, his central characters are continually compromised. Invoking Dickens’s early anxieties about his authorial identity, and his later anxieties over his “lost courage,” I analyse the implications of this Dickensian hero-protagonist split. Such a focus privileges the life-writing of Dickens’s most famous characters, through whom he asked to be remembered. Pickwick and Oliver Twist, and Little Dorrit’s biography. I trace this trend through Dickens’s novels self-consciously exhibiting the tenets of life-writing-which I refer to as his life-writing novels-including David Copperfield’s (fictional) autobiography, the memoirs of Mr. ![]() not been made explicit is how these concerns manifest in a curious pattern, wherein Dickens’s professed protagonists-the ostensible hero/ine/s of their respective texts-are often deposed overshadowed, as it were, in their own life histories. Scholarship has previously examined Dickens’s notorious fusing of fact and fiction, his angst about legacy, and his shifting authorial identity. ![]() Dickens’s reputation has since become public domain, however, and neo-Victorian authors are re-imagining the Dickensian. He even edited his own identity by burning both his correspondence and an early attempt at autobiography. Charles Dickens sought to control the narratives of everyone he encountered, both in life and on the page. ![]()
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