ABSTRACT
In a letter to William F. de Cerjat, Charles Dickens recalled his first encounter with Gad’s Hill Place, a country home he had bought the previous year. This well-known and often-quoted anecdote of Dickens’s purchase of Gad’s Hill Place is regarded as a remarkable triumph, just as his being forced to work in a blacking factory was an indelible humiliation, in his life. Dickens was proud of fulfilling his childhood dream of purchasing this house and delighted to have shared with William Shakespeare the same natural landscape. The spiritual and geographical connection may serve as a good point of departure to explore how Dickens viewed and employed Shakespeare and his plays in his own works. In many of his works, Dickens often held a negative and biased view of female characters in terms of their intellectual capability. Whether in his personal life or in his fictional or non-fictional works, Dickens’s close affinity to Shakespeare is too prominent to be overlooked.
