Ambivalent Father Figures and the Enigma of Male Identity in Dickens’s Fiction by Max Véga-Ritter

“…It throws light on the way Dickens functioned in his earlier novels ambivalently or irresolutely, but alternately, on two opposite poles of his mind, those of self-identification with the benign—but eventually possibly inadequate—father image in the Pickwick Papers—the second Scrooge—or of a counter identification with its opposite negative image—the Rebels—in Oliver Twist, leaving the question of sex identity open or in a state of conundrum. …”
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Steel Bubbles: Death, Inexhaustibility, and Dickens’s Idea of the Book in Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836) by Jeffrey Jackson

“…Sketches by Boz has been regarded as the book that qualified Charles Dickens as being among those paragons celebrated at Mrs Leo Hunter’s déjeuner in The Pickwick Papers: ‘real authors who had written whole books’. …”
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