In The Uncommercial Traveller, Charles Dickens uses his writing to create his public, yet intimate, persona.  I can think of only one other situation in which a writer uses their work to develop their persona, and that’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Under the pen name Lemony Snicket, the author creates an elaborate backstory for himself-as-Snicket, who narrates and “researches” the lives of the Baudelaire orphans.  He references, in vague terms, his personal tragedy surrounding Beatrice, who is connected to the characters in the series. He claims to visit the settings of the books, where he writes letters to his editor included as epilogues.  He even writes an autobiography, which only adds to the mystery because it doesn’t really explain who he is. As a fifth grader reading the books, this vexed me greatly, but now that I’m a college student and a more professional writer, I find it clever and engaging.  

Snicket’s literary persona is a mask, a character in itself that hides the author’s true identity, and his probably far less extraordinary life, from his audience.  When I compare Snicket to the grown-up Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller, I wonder if they both serve this hiding purpose.  A public persona is, after all, not a complete image of the person in question.  It inevitably includes, or more often leaves out, facets of the person.  

I’m no Dickens expert, so I don’t know how much of the young Dickens in the story is true.  The child is earnest and hopeful, longing to live in the house that Dickens owns as an adult, but believing it’s an impossible dream.  Dickens works hard to evoke an endearing child we readers want the best for. Knowing the adult Dickens lives in Gadshill, I can practically hear him telling small, aspirational children, “You too can make your dreams come true if you persevere, just as my father told me!”  It feels a little too classic rags-to-riches, which takes away the authenticity Dickens strives for in creating such a “queer, small boy” and such an unpompous manhood self. It also suggests that Dickens views himself as a rags-to-riches story, considering he makes little to no effort to draw any distinction between himself and his story-adult-self.  If that is so, then this persona also masks Dickens’s true face, to himself as well as to his fans, by only showing a part of his history, an a nice part at that.  This could be his coping mechanism for his difficult childhood: focusing only on the pretty, inspirational parts and leaving the rougher parts unsaid.

His you-too-can-make-your-dreams-come-true message comes across clearly through these two personas—like Lemony Snicket, another character and another story being told.