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Helluva twist: Did Dickens create the first android in literature?

Feedback explores electrifying new research linking the antagonist of Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield "to the electrically-sparked monster" in Frankenstein

By Marc Abrahams

12 April 2023

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Josie Ford

Helluva twist

CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being “interrogated” (that’s the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.

Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller and a stalwart of the Dickens Society, says he has identified a supply of electricity that flows, in a literary way, through the people in Dickens’s novel David Copperfield. Parrott announced his discovery in the March issue of the Society’s Dickens Quarterly, with a jolting 27 pages of facts – and perhaps some conjectures – all wired together with the title “Electrical undercurrents in David Copperfield” …

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