ABSTRACT
In Dickens’s early ction the most apparently ordinary gures can become heroes through the directive focus of a narrative lens, while David Coppereld’s accession to literary fame renders his initially obscure personal history compelling as a myth of the writer’s development. In the later ction less trustworthy gures are also enabled to write their own stories, as the increasingly sophisticated deployment of unreliable rst-person narrators is used to blur the boundaries between public and private modes, domesticating the act of writing and complicating the apprehension of the writer’s experience as literary myth. The boundaries between public and private writing are further contested in the ctionalising tendencies of many of Dickens’s letters, even as readers are encouraged to take the ction as a form of personal correspondence.
