'Dickens's evocation of the fears, excitement and confusion of childhood is peerless'

DR LEE JACKSON ON WHY CHARLES DICKENS REMAINS RELEVANT TODAY

- DR LEE JACKSON

Why do so many people still find Charles Dickens fascinating, more than 150 years after his death? For a start, the echoes of his own life in his work continue to intrigue us. Mapping biography to fiction has its dangers - Dickens is never simply telling us his life story. Nonetheless, as one early 20th-century critic put it, "the secret of Dickens's sympathy with neglected childhood is to be found in the story of his own early days". Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Pip - a host of orphaned children - speak to something deep in his psyche, a feeling of abandonment and shame, associated with his childhood experience at Warren's Blacking Factory, and his father's imprisonment for debt. He is a writer about whom we know so much - a lively, sociable, dynamic self-made man, whose surviving letters run to 12 volumes. Nonetheless, new connections, new correspondence, and new portraits, are still being