What Mr Micawber thinks of Charles Dickens

In Competition No. 3177 you were invited to submit a well-known fictional person’s view of their author.

Highlights in a varied and engaging entry included Janine Beacham’s Mrs Malaprop: ‘I am indelibly proud to be the procreation of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a calibrated writer of plagues…’; Anthony Blanche’s withering verdict on Evelyn Waugh as told to J.C.H. Mounsey: ‘My dear, what can I say? An absolute horror. Snobbish of course, being trade through and through. Constantly claiming gentry in his own b-b-background when the best that could be found were rows of sturdy yeomen…’; and Peter Quint giving the lowdown on his creator, courtesy of David Shields: ‘This personage, impressive of form, somewhat forbidding of countenance, possessed of an apparently aristocratic dignity of bearing, and, as regards speech, prone, if not to prolixity, then, at the very least, to a pronounced — the word is, I judge, not inappropriate — orotundity…’

Honourable mentions also go to unlucky losers George Simmers, W.J.