Tattycoram

by Audrey Thomas

Caricatured by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit as the cantankerous maid of Mr. and Mrs. Meagles, "Tattycoram" tells her own life story in this utterly compelling metafiction by the celebrated author of Isobel Gunn . Throughout her career, Audrey Thomas has repeatedly challenged her readers to follow her into new territory. In Tattycoram , she does it again, taking readers into the distant fictional world of Charles Dickens's England, where, in an unusual twist, Dickens interacts with his own characters, allowing Thomas to raise questions about the intersection of life and art. In Thomas's hands, Harriet Coram gains both a poignant personal history and a quiet dignity. Abandoned as a baby at the London Foundling Hospital and cared for by a kindly foster mother until the age of five, the young Hattie attracts the attention of the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, who hires her as the family housemaid. In the Dickens household, Charles's sister Miss Georgina takes an instant dislike to Hattie's pretty looks and trains her caged raven to tease her with the mocking nickname of Tattycoram. Although Hattie escapes from Dickens and his family to care for her dying foster mother in the country, she is later swept back under the famous author's sphere of observation as a teacher in his newly founded school for released female convicts. There she befriends Elizabeth Avis, who also appears as another minor character from Little Dorrit . In typical Dickensian fashion, Hattie meets not one, but two, long-lost brothers and falls in love with the one who conveniently turns out not to be her "real" brother. But first, she must confront her benefactor about his shameless misrepresentation of her and Elizabeth's characters in his latest novel.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, British Literature

205 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Audrey Grace Thomas, née Callahan, novelist and short story writer (b at Binghamton, NY 17 Nov 1935). Audrey Thomas was educated at Smith College, Mass, and St Andrews University, Scotland, and then taught in England for a year. In 1959 she moved to Canada and in 1963 earned an MA at the University of British Columbia. From 1964 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, but eventually settled on Galiano Island. She has published more than 15 novels and short story collections, more than 20 radio plays, several broadcast on CBC Radio, and numerous travel articles, some of which featured in Air Canada's in-flight magazine.

Thomas' writing has been described as feminine; her forte is the minutiae of women's lives, and she has claimed to strive "to demonstrate the terrible gap between men and women" and "to give women a sense of their bodies." Her style is characterized by word play; she emphasizes puns, etymologies, euphemisms, words within words, and pointing to the inherent possibilities, ironies and ambiguities of language. This close attention to language highlights the act of writing itself, and the possibilities and impossibilities of communication in human relationships. Her writing is also rich with literary allusion, from Shakespeare to Conrad, and from the Bible to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Audrey Thomas is a multi-award winning author. She has been recognized provincially, winning the Ethel Wilson Prize three times (for Intertidal Life, 1985, Wild Blue Yonder, 1991 and Coming Down from Wa, 1996). She has twice been nominated for the Governor General's Award (1984 and 1985), and has been internationally recognized with the Canada-Scotland Writer's Literary fellowship (1984-6) and the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1989). In 1987 she won the Marian Engel Award, awarded annually to a female Canadian author for her contribution to Canadian literature. In 2003 Audrey Thomas won the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award.

(from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.co...)

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Audrey Thomas at a Writer's Workshop on Denman Island. She inspired me with her alacrity. In 3 hours, with 8 writers who created 4 short pieces inspired by her, Audrey gave each of us invaluable feedback to mull over once the Workshop was completed.

I bought her latest novel, Tattycoram, based solely on my time with Audrey , and I so happy that I did..

The book artfully explores the dilemma any writer faces when wanting to incorporate an overheard line, or a fascinating tale, without the knowledge or permission of the originator of the morsel!

She illustrates this elegantly in 'Tattycoram', a character from Little Dorrit, by Charles Dickens. Her novel takes a fictitious character from the Dicken's novel and tells her 'real' story. Very challenging undertaking...

It left me as a reader/writer pondering fact and fiction, my use of 'private' stories and the influence a writer may unwittingly have on a person's life.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a big fan of Dickens, but one quibble I have is that he doesn't seem to know how to write young women. I read Little Dorrit, and felt that Tattycoram got the shaft big time. She was actually an interesting character: smart, but resentful that her circumstances forced her to be subservient to the idiots she was surrounded by. But then she gets treated very shabbily in the end; she runs away, is returned, and has to be grateful to said idiots for taking her back. When I stumbled across Audrey Thomas's book I knew I wanted to read a more nuanced take on this character, and as this year's BookRiot Read Harder Challenge includes a fanfic as one of the reading challenges, this fit the bill nicely.

The premise of this book is that Hattie goes to work as a servant in the Dickens household for a time, and eventually as an assistant at one of Dickens' charitable causes after she shows herself to be intelligent and capable. Years later, she discovers that Dickens has lampooned her for the character of Tattycoram. I enjoyed this slice of British history about foundling children, and I really like how Thomas developed her own very different take on the character.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this before midnight on December 31st, so I DID hit my goal of 60 books in 2022.

I did highly enjoy this and will seek out the author's other works. An imagining of the origins of one of Charles Dickens' characters (from Little Dorrit) as he was notorious for "borrowing" characters from real life.

Who owns their story, and what does that mean? A great question, and an in-depth look at what it means to be abandoned as a child.

[Clivemichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative tale

[Forked Radish]

Sounds like a travesty, but at least she hasn't undergone a race change, unlike to the BBC abomination.

[Beka · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I remember correctly, I was ten or eleven, perhaps twelve, when I first ventured into "adult" fiction, and it was with this book. It was just something my mother had lying around, and it was thin and a very quick read.

I loved it. It is sad and at times very brutal, but I found the story fascinating and beautiful. To some it may be a 'meh' book, but for me it represented my growing up, and the leaving behind of innocence because of that very maturity. Whenever I have children, I want to share this book with them when they're old enough to appreciate its message.

What message? For me, it's that we have good and bad, beauty and ugliness all through life. We have to appreciate the good and use the bad to strengthen our souls. And even at the end, when we've found peace, there will always be questions, and a quest to make the world a better place.

[Yanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am not agreed with the resume . They say the story is about how Diken used in his book the charactere of the maid. So you can think this book will be all about this story. But not all, it is only 20 pages of the book. The rest of the story is about this young woman, how she was abandonned and grew up in familly who keep her until age 5, because it was time for her to return with nones and learn to be a maid. How she will be hired as maid for the writer Dikens .
It is nice book, I enjoyed myself, and well written.

[Carol Fillmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book!! author really wrote so much like Dickens himself. This would make a wonderful costume drama on tv:))

[Joelle Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, although the beginning was so sad I wasn't sure I wanted to carry on! I haven't read Little Dorrit, but I'm curious now.

[Brenda · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting historical fiction about life in Dickens' England