The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871) is a bildungsroman told in first person narrative by its eponymous hero. In its early chapters, it has clear affinities with Dickens's David Copperfield and Great Expectations; there are echoes particularly of David Copperfield - the pervasive London fog and the schooldays with a Steerforth figure, for example. Unlike David, however, Harry is not rewarded by a home with its ‘Angel in the House'; instead, the novel ends with a burning of the ancestral home that echoes Jane Eyre and prefigures Wide Sargasso Sea and Rebecca, both classic Gothic texts by women. Thus the tale of the motherless young man achieving wisdom and maturity after being buffeted between the influences of his traditional English grandfather and his adventurer father like a ‘shuttlecock' ends in an irruption of the...
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Citation: Zlosnik, Sue. "The Adventures of Harry Richmond". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 October 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10362, accessed 12 February 2026.]
