Douglas-Fairhurst 2011
From Commonplace Book
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. Becoming Dickens: the Invention of a Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.
- 237: Going through Bleak House, Forster worried that the spikily satirical representation of Skimpole was too obviously based on the poet and essayist Leigh Hunt. Dickens smoothed it down. Even when he said things Dickens would have preferred not to hear, such as that Little Nell needed to die if The Old Curiosity Shop was to be completed satisfactorily, a sacrifice both to the marketplace and to the demands of the plot, Dickens listened and did as Forster urged.
