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We cannot blame Charles Dickens for not meeting our national Arts treasure Philip P. Pirip, but:

go blame yr rottern Fate;

whos flushs beat yr faces straights

It could be said, though, Dickens did lend his major characters to Philip P. Pirip, although ‘lend’ might not be the best word; rather freedom opened the door to its wide-open spaces to allow them to escape and give vent to their grievances with their famous author, seeing as to how he never once mentioned the fabulous Surnevv diamonds that they once had their hands on and now wanted back at whatever cost to literature.

Fabulous royalties might have been Charles Dickens’s lot but the diamonds were the only avenue for riches beyond creative writing for Miss Haversham, Estella, Mister Jaggers, Compeyson, Orlick, Biddy and a whole cast of actors and naked ‘actrusses’ who now demanded their jewel dues and were willing to kill for them.

That escape fell to them after ‘Great Expectations’ found its way onto one of the heaps in the rubbish tip that was beloved of Pirip and in fact the location of his Tiphome, a dump in itself. From that fact, it was only a short fictional distance for the Dickens’s characters to land on Pirip’s lap with a vengeance.

They came to lap

but I stukk out tongue, ‘take thapt’!

How our hero struggles with them might not be in any universal history books but, in artistic circles, it set the standard for the license to cull.

Bill Reed is an Australian playwright, novelist and short story writer who has won national awards in each of these categories. He has also been the Publisher in three of the country’s leading book publishers.