Existing comment:
The Original Tiny Tim
Daguerreotype, ca 1848
Harry Burnett, the son of Charles Dickens's eldest sister, Fanny Burnett, is said to have been the model for both Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol and Paul Dombey in Dombey and Son. He died in January 1849, only a few months after his mother. "Harry was a singular child," Fanny's pastor recalled, "meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree." This photograph once belonged to Elizabeth Dickens, Charles Dickens's mother. |