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Boll stresses the autobiographical character of Charles Dickens' novels, particularly Oliver Twist, and the effect of genuineness which is a consequence of what can be considered the author's own experiences. The author dwells on the personality of Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, who is created according to the prototype of Dickens' sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. Both wrestled with death at the tender age of seventeen. The death of his gentle, beautiful relative
unnerved the poet deeply and paralyzed his creative power for some time. The identification of the novelist with this dying girl is expressed in a letter: 'The recollection of her is an essential part of my being and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is'. Mary Hogarth returns in the character of Nell in Old Curiosity Shop as a fusion of a self-image with Mary Hogarth. Nell's relationship to her extravagant, self-deluding grandfather is a sentimental reversion of Dickens' dissatisfactory relation to his own incompetent father. Boll recognizes that Dickens has mourned in Mary Hogarth the decline of his own youth; he threw off the paralyzing effect of this death through the characterization of young women in his novels.
The psychoanalyst might in addition be inclined to see in these sentimental female figures, Dickens' potentialities towards feminine passivity and masochistic surrender to the miseries of his childhood which he had to overcome by those creative activities that made him one of the most successful novelists of his time.