‘Postcolonial Dickens’, in David Paroissien (ed.), A Companion to Charles Dickens, Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, pp. 486–500

Orwell’s account of reading David Copperfield as a boy and believing that the novel’s early chapters were actually written by a child is one well-known version of this story. What is unusual, therefore, about the excerpts quoted above is not so much any originality in the experience they describe as the locations in which that experience took place: Nigeria, India, Kenya, and Trinidad.