Dickens’ worlds are sprawling and expansive they’re riddled with gaps for a reader (or a writer) to work their way into. Many classic authors write beautifully tight, self-contained novels. He’s brilliant, socially conscious and plain hilarious, often all at once-as anyone who’s read the first page of A Christmas Carol can attest to.ĭavid, bless him, is an idiot.ĭickens also has a lot of scope to play with. His stories are given to or retold for children (controversial opinion: Disney’s Oliver and Company is still one of the best adaptations of Oliver Twist), and yet they’re also considered challenging for adults. His works were and are intensely popular, and yet they’re also the subject of academic debate and research. But Dickens is one of those wonderful writers who bridges the gap between reading for scholarship and reading for pleasure. I don’t have a particular academic background in Dickens, or even in Victorian literature, though I’ve tutored on plenty of university courses that included both. I do, honestly, love Dickens, but there are many writers I love just as much or more. I needed a writer whose work was vast and malleable enough to be read in all these different ways. I already knew that Charley was a literary scholar, for this very reason-and I knew that whatever he specialised in was going to shape the backbone of the plot. I wanted to try to capture the joyous intellectual discovery to be had in English Literature scholarship, as science fiction has often done for physics and electronics. But doing a true, deep close analysis of a book is about doing exactly that at best, it’s solving a mystery and falling in love at once. I know studying books is often seen as a barrier to the pleasures of reading them-as though it’s impossible to feel a book if you think too hard about it. I also wanted to write about literary analysis. I wanted to write about childhood reading after lights out, about reading curled up by the fire, about adventure stories and fantasies and connecting so deeply with a character that they come alive and never quite leave you. When I started writing The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, I knew very early on that this was going to be a book about books and the many different ways we read them. But is Uriah Heep a victim more than he is a villain? Parry explains why turning to Dickens was the key to unlocking her own story. When the villianous Uriah Heep escapes from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, Charley and Rob race to find him and put him back. But since Charley can sometimes use this ability unconsciously, especially when he’s particularly interested in a book, it causes no end of trouble for him and for his long-suffering brother, Rob. Parry’s debut novel, literary scholar Charley Sutherland has an ability that would make most book lovers weep with envy: He can bring characters out of books and into the real world.
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