Browsing by Author "Troost, Josephine Jay"

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    Fictionalising Charles Dickens : his public and private lives in three Neo-Victorian biofictions
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2024-03) Troost, Josephine Jay; Ellis, Jeanne, 1962-; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of English.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: In 1849 and 1860 Charles Dickens burned all of his correspondence and diaries in an effort to avoid his fiction being read/interpreted through the lens of its author’s life. This thesis analyses three neo-Victorian biofictions: Girl in a Blue Dress (2008) by Gaynor Arnold, Jack Maggs (1997) by Peter Carey, and Wanting (2008) by Richard Flanagan to explore the contradiction between Dickens’s public persona and his private life. This thesis explores his obsessive secrecy and need for control over his life’s narrative, together with his willingness to hurt other people in order to maintain his version of events and preserve his image as the epitome of Victorian middle-class, family-centred morality and caring philanthropy. The three focus texts are linked by their respective depictions of Dickens’s intimate relationships with the different women in his life, by the parallels and differences between these texts and a range of biographies about Dickens, and by the different ways each author has engaged with the ethical considerations inherent in neo-Victorian biofiction’s reimaging of real historical figures from the nineteenth century. This thesis also links Girl in a Blue Dress to Victorian marriage law, Jack Maggs to questions of authorial ethics, stealing stories, and the development of copyright law, and Wanting to Dickens’s own perspectives on the colonial project, as demonstrated by his fiction and journalism.