How many characters from Victorian novels lived on to inspire late 20th-century heavy metal bands? Uriah Heep is unique in that respect (and many others) and in part it's simply because Dickens made this villain from "David Copperfield" so repulsive – bereft of eyelashes and brows, high-shouldered, bony, and writhing. (Some peers suggested Dickens may have modeled his appearance on that of fellow writer Hans Christian Andersen.) But it's Heep's sinister greed and patent insincerity, his grating claims to be nothing but an "umble servant" even as he attempts to rob his betters blind, that have kept him so alive in popular imagination.
