Books: Victoriana Family Secrets: a Writer's Search for His Parents and

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More than a century after Charles Dickens' pageant of nameless benefactors, twists of narrative, and startling revelations, Journalist David Leitch, 45, appears with a document that ratifies the conventions of the Victorian novel. In the first volume of his autobiography, God Stand Up for Bastards (1973), Leitch recalled his adoptive parents and the mysterious couple who secretly and illegally relinquished their nine-day-old infant. "This title might seem like a calculated insult to my mother," he began. "In a way it is. But I have a sneaking hunch--and hope--that hard words may entice her out of the shadows."

The lure worked. After decades of silence, Leitch arranged to meet a reader named Truda, in Liverpool: "Recognition was total, instantaneous. Her expression revealed a moment of fear so acute it was like a pain." Like many other adopted children, her son had his own fears. Were his own flaws environmental, or were they "symbolic perhaps of a greater human carelessness which would forever tie me to my mother's defection"?

Leitch candidly describes his dilemma, and sadly recounts the ironies of his ruined marriage: by the time he unearths the most persuasive evidence of his origins, his wife and young son have gone 12,000 miles away to Australia. In 1981, seven years after Truda surfaced, he receives a phone call. The speaker is a woman named Margaret, who informs him that his mother is dead. She is, it turns out, Leitch's elusive sister. The siblings meet, joyously ransack memories and make the most astonishing discovery of all: there is yet a younger sister, Linda Elizabeth. She has been adopted, but she is untraceable. It is for her that Family Secrets is written, in the hope that she too will answer the call of the blood and complete the outline of a long-damaged family tree.

Even if Linda Elizabeth never responds, she is indirectly responsible for a powerfully evocative volume that gives dimension to the questions haunting every child deprived of his genealogy. It is part confession, part portrait of Britain, with its intimidating social strata, its cloaked poverty and strained respectability. And it is incontrovertible proof that Dickens, the great middle-class fantasist, the maker of grotesques and waifs and seekers, was a teller of more enduring truths than even he suspected.