Ken Gelder

you know, prolific reader of his own work to audiences, sometimes quite large audiences.

So some of the characters who actually came to Australia, if you think of Magwitch in Great Expectations or Mr. McCorber, also, you know, would become popular and there'd be some interest in Mr. McCorber in Australia.

Like, you know, what did that mean?

But Dickens also gave people a lot of...

you know, parameters kind of narrative parameters to measure Australian life, colonial life.

So someone like Marcus Clark, the Australian writer who's massively influenced by Dickens wrote, wrote about Melbourne, Melbourne underworlds and Melbourne Bohemians with completely with Dickens in mind.

So Marcus Clark would, was one of those, um, you know, social journalists, a bit like Henry Mayhew.

If you think of Henry Mayhew in the 1860s in London, um,

Marcus Clark was one of those journalists who would go out into the streets and talk to people and write about things like opium dens in Melbourne and prostitution in Melbourne and street life, street itinerants and so on and so on.

And he'd go out at night time too and do the same kind of things.

So Dickens was a well-known night walker.

And we have night walkers in or we had night walkers in

in Australia too, in the colonies, really charting what went on in unseen or much less visible ways in the colonial cities.

And Dickens was the influence there.

He really shaped the way those things got talked about.

Well, I really grew up on Great Expectations, which is like a really stupid novel to grow up on, really, I think, because it's all about the

the ongoing delusion of a young character as he gets older and older, and he thinks a woman is in love with him, and he turns out to be completely wrong.

He thinks that someone has given him money or an inheritance, and he turns out to be completely wrong.

But it's the great 19th century.

We call them Bildungsroman, which is the novel of education.