ABSTRACT
As Dickens’s fame grew, he actively encouraged readers to conate his authorial persona with his books, identifying himself rst as the whimsical ‘Boz’ and subsequently as the more individualised and recognisable ‘Charles Dickens’. Just this infusion of the writing into the image of the writer himself can be seen in the representation of Dickens by the journalist G. A. Sala, in his 1870 Charles Dickens. Sala writes unabashedly that ‘he was my master; and but for his friendship and encouragement, I should never have been a journalist or a writer of books’ (vi). Crucially in this account the gure of the literary teacher is known to his readers through particular ctions before he can be encountered as an actual person; as Sala explains, it may make him appear less fanatical if he states that:
when he rst came before the world as an author I was an illiterate child, gifted with a strongly retentive memory, but Blind; that the chief solace in my blindness was to hear my sister read the “Sketches by Boz;” that when I recovered my sight it was out of “Pickwick,” and by the same loving teacher that I was taught to read; and that nally I knew him from 1836 upwards, and, in literature, served him faithfully for nineteen years. (98)
The two modes of relationship are intended to be largely interchangeable. As Slater reminds us, ‘one of the main things that Dickens still represents in our culture is an ideal of perfect, blissful, quintessentially English, domesticity’ (The Great Charles Dickens Scandal 191).
