What Mr Micawber thinks of Charles Dickens

In Competition No. 3177 you were invited to submit a well-known fictional person’s view of their author.

Highlights in a varied and engaging entry included Janine Beacham’s Mrs Malaprop: ‘I am indelibly proud to be the procreation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a calibrated writer of plagues…’; Anthony Blanche’s withering verdict on Evelyn Waugh as told to J.C.H. Mounsey: ‘My dear, what can I say? An absolute horror. Snobbish of course, being trade through and through. Constantly claiming gentry in his own b-b-background when the best that could be found were rows of sturdy yeomen…’; and Peter Quint giving the lowdown on his creator, courtesy of David Shields: ‘This personage, impressive of form, somewhat forbidding of countenance, possessed of an apparently aristocratic dignity of bearing, and, as regards speech, prone, if not to prolixity, then, at the very least, to a pronounced — the word is, I judge, not inappropriate — orotundity…’

Honourable mentions also go to unlucky losers George Simmers, W.J. Webster, Chris Ramsey, John Priestland and John Gledhill. The winners earn £30.

Wilkins Micawber raised his almost-empty glass. ‘Gentlemen,’ he intoned, ‘let us celebrate our man of many words, Mr Charles Dickens. He is no straw, buffeted by the verbose and wild winds of sorry circumstance but a firm grasper of life’s abiding principle that something will always turn up.‘In the teeming world of his fertile imagination there are great riches. A chapter amply filling its pages, result happiness; a chapter falling short, result misery. Has he ever failed in the pursuit of prosperous production? No! Look at his capacious family, their bosoms heaving with joy and gratitude for the plenitude of his generosity. Look at how he extends this beneficence beyond their bounds, bestowing himself on the tender shoots of impoverished youthful femininity. I myself am limited in capacity to my beloved Emma but Mr Dickens knows no such containment.