ABSTRACT
While Dickens’s famously autobiographical novel apparently closes the gap between writer and reader, it is also engaged in new and subtle ways of mythologising the gure of the author. David Coppereld, published in volume form in 1850, raises the question of just what a literary biography might look like, even assuming the appropriateness of publishing details of a writer’s life, a subject on which Dickens himself expressed deep ambivalence. Inevitably interest in his life increased with his growing fame, although he consistently resisted attempts from interested correspondents to secure biographical details. Given the care with which his own letters are crafted, it is perhaps surprising to nd one writer castigated on the grounds that ‘He writes about his books, rather as if he saw his future biography in his mind’s eye, with this letter in it’ (To Charles Knight, 4 September 1850. Pilgrim 12. Appendix A 626).
