From: David Parker (cdickens@RMPLC.CO.UK)
Date: Mon Feb 08 1999 - 03:25:58 PST
My dear Miss Garden, Needless to say, my story "Great Expectations" is fiction. The writer of fiction, however, has no better material with which to construct his stories, than the events of his own life, and I do not doubt they influenced me when I was imagining the adventures and misadventures of Pip, Estella and the other characters. Some ten years previously, I had written the story of David Copperfield. At many points that follows the events of my own childhood and youth, but it is a story of a young man who loses his birthright and regains it. When I came to write "Great Expectations," I thought it would be interesting to imagine the story of a young man who has no birthright to speak of, but becomes a gentleman nevertheless, and finds it not all he had hoped. Though the events described in "Great Expectations" match my own life much less closely than those described in "David Copperfield," Pip's good fortune, despite his birth and background, is perhaps closer to my own experience than David Copperfield quest to regain the privileges of his early life. Pip is the character most like myself. Faithfully yours, Charles Dickens ____________________________________________________________________________ >I am writing to you regarding your novel Great Expectations. I have some >questions for you. >1. Was the plot of the novel something that you observed or experienced in >your lifetime? >2. What character was most like yourself? >Thank you. >Teniece Garden >