Louis is reading a biography of Dickens, the nineteenth-century writer, when Lestat visits him in BT.

Dickens was a pervasive influence on Rice: "My teacher, my mentor, my guardian angel, my love, my god is Dickens," she asserts. Dickens concentrated on such themes as the inner struggle between being a hero and being a villian, the complexity of good and evil.

"The clearest theme to me is the theme of David Copperfield and Great Expectations," Rice explains. "We are in a world without parents and we have to discover who our true brothers and sisters are. How do we define our values as orphans in a storm? And the values that provided the scaffolding of, say, medieval literature collapse, how does the wanderer find new values? How do we become our own parents? It's a theme in IV, when Louis stops looking to Lestat as the total authority and accepts the fact that he himself knows as much as anybody else. Lestat is my hero because he does not make that mistake. He wants to hear what the old ones have to say, but he never really thinks they're Mom and Pop. He's too smart for that."

When Lestat visits Armand nearly a century after he had left him in Paris, he thinks Armand possesses the essence of such characters in Dicken's novel, as David Copperfield and Steerforth. He also paraphrases a quote from David Copperfield as a theme for QD: "I don't know whether I'm the hero or the victim of this tale."

As in Dicken's novels, the dichotomies of good/evil and hero/victim are interconnected concepts.

Lestat also quotes from Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities when he searches for an opening line for BT.

The Vampire Companion ~ Katherine Ramsland

Charles Dickens (1812-70). Best known for his host of distinctively cruel, comic and repugnant characters, Charles Dickens remains the most widely read of the Victorian novelists.

Born in Portsmouth in 1812, Charles Dickens was the second child of a clerk in the Navy Pay-Office. His childhood, like many of those portrayed in his novels, was not a particularly happy one, owing in the main to his father's inability to stay out of debt. This led, in 1824, to his father's imprisionment in Marshalsea prison and Dickens being sent to work in a blacking warehouse. Memories of this time haunted him for the rest of his life. In defiance of his parents' failure to educate him, Dickens worked hard, becoming first a clerk in a solicitor's office then in 1834 a reporter of Parliamentary debates for the Morning Chronicle. It is from here that Dicken's talent for portraits and caricatures stemmed, and his Sketches by Boz, which appeared in the Monthly Magazine and the Evening Chronicle, became imensely poplular. Following on from this was The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), which made Dicken's characters the centre of a popular cult. With the serialisation of Oliver Twist (1837-9) Dickens began his indictment of the cruelty that children suffer at the hands of society. While working on Oliver Twist, Dickens learned of the death of his beloved sister-in-law, Mary. The grief he displayed at this news seems to underline the less than loving relationship he had with his wife Catherine, from whom he was finally separated in 1858.

Dickens followed the success of Oliver Twist with Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). He travelled to America later that year and while there his advocacy of an international copyright law and support for the abolition of slavery aroused the hostility of the Armeican press. On his return to England, Dickens wrote Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-4) and the hugely popular Christmas Books. After the publication of Dombey and Son in 1846-8 Dickens's novels became increasingly sombre, with his social criticism more radical and his comedy more savage. Between 1849 and his death in 1870 Dickens published David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, Little Dorrit, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. His last novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, was never completed and was later published posthumously. Public grief at Dicken's death was considerable and he was buried in Poet's corner at Westminster Abbey.

Written in the form of an autobiography, David Copperfield was first published in twenty instalments stretching from May 1849 to November 1850. With such memorable characters as Micawber and Uriah Heep, David Copperfield is highly praised as one of Dickens's best books.

First serialised in the journal All the Year Round in 1861, Great Expectations is regarded by many as Dicken's finest achievement.

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