From the characters of Dickens to the fifth Duke of Portland, who was so fearful of being gawped at that he dug tunnels to carry him around his estate, David McKie chooses his top 10 eccentrics in books, both fictional and biographical

David McKie is a journalist and historian. His latest book, Bright Particular Stars: A Gallery of Glorious British Eccentrics, is published this month.

"People tend to assume that eccentric means weird and wacky. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. The first definition offered by my Chambers dictionary is 'departing from the centre ... out of the normal course ... not conforming to common rules' - and the characters in my book conform to that test. Some are weird and wacky, others immensely serious - all are true originals. The collection that follows contains five fictional characters and five real ones. As in my book, it ignores those I think of as designer eccentrics: people who affect a wackiness that may be contrived, not simply spontaneous. They know who they are."

The fictional:

1. Sairey Gamp, in Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

In the novels of Dickens it's the non-eccentrics who are in the minority, but Mrs Gamp is one of the richest among the majority with her unquenchable flow of proverbs, her inventive relationship with her friend Mrs Harris, and the fragrance she carries with her, as her creator says, "borne upon the breeze, as if a passing fairy had hiccoughed and had previously been to a wine-vault."

The White Knight in Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

My favourite piece on Carroll's chessboard since I first encountered him, with his songs, his uncertain seat in the saddle, and his talent for strange inventions. And, I guess, Carroll's favourite too. The mild blue eyes and kindly smile of the knight, his armour agleam in the setting sun, his horse gently cropping the grass: "of all the strange things that Alice saw in her journey ... this was always the one she remembered most clearly." Me too.

Aunt Dot in The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

Fiction is full of endearing eccentric aunts, though sometimes, as in Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt, these aunts are not what they seem. But Aunt Dot, immortally announced on page one ("'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, climbing down from that animal on her return from high Mass.") is all-aunt and all-eccentric.

Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time sequence

The most eccentric figure in Powell's gallery might seem to be X Trapnel, the bearded, ex-service-greatcoated, swordstick-toting novelist, said to be loosely based on the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross. But in both cases here, affectation has been at work. A truer, much darker, eccentric - from his first appearance as an Eton schoolboy pounding heavily out of fog to his bizarre fatal collapse some fifty years on, still obsessively running - Widmerpool wholly and naturally meets the essential requirement of being "out of the normal course…not conforming to common rules."

Pedro Camacho in Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

"He's not a man, he's an industry" a colleague at the radio station tells the narrator when Pedro arrives in Lima. "He writes all the stage plays put on in Bolivia and acts in all of them. And he also writes all the radio serials, directs them, and plays the male lead in every one." Soon that will prove to be an understatement. To get the sense of his characters when writing, he dresses up to resemble them: "he went over to his suitcase, opened it, and began to pull out of the depths of it, like a prestidigitator pulling rabbits or flags out of a hat, an incredible collection of objects: an English magistrate's court wig, false mustaches of various sizes ... a surgeon's white smock, false ears and noses ... " This book is magic.

And the real:

William Beckford, in William Beckford by James Lees-Milne

Beckford was the only legitimate son of an immensely rich London alderman. He became a lavish but discriminating collector of pictures, books and furniture, and built an exotic palace at Fonthill in Wiltshire, topped off by a tower higher (as he had stipulated) than the spire of Salisbury cathedral. Of his books, the most famous was his wild Eastern fantasy Vathek which, for its colour, wit and invention, remains a ripely rewarding read. He was forced to live in exile for a time to escape scandal after falling in love with the 11-year-old son of an aristocratic household , and was at various points MP for Wells in Somerset and Hindon in Wiltshire, though he rarely appeared at Westminster. Saying he was sick of being harassed by sightseers, he sold Fonthill Abbey (soon after, his great tower, the work of a jerrybuilder, collapsed) and built himself another house and tower on the hills above Bath. Here he would hold dinner parties where, having welcomed his guests, he would take himself off to an upstairs room for the rest of the evening. "How strange my make-up is," he once mused. Few can have ever been stranger.

"Doctor" Joseph Healey in Passages in the Life of a Radical, by Samuel Bamford

Bamford was a Lancashire radical at around the time of Peterloo. The cheerful, uncouth, chaotic Healey was a fellow agitator with a compelling taste for amateur dentistry. When fleeing the police, he heard the cries of a woman with vicious toothache and was unable to resist the chance of performing extractions. The bloody results more than confirmed the household's initial suspicions that he was not a dentist at all.

William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, fifth Duke of Portland, in Amazing Grace: the Great Days of Dukes, by ES Turner

This character was always fearful of being gawped at - so he built a tunnel under his parkland at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire to take him under cover to different destinations on the estate. If he travelled to London he would ride in his coach, blinds drawn, to Worksop station, where his coach would be loaded on to the train with him sitting in it. Servants and tenants who accidentally spotted him were told to pretend that they hadn't. Sometimes he would go for a walk in the dark, preceded by a woman servant carrying a lantern no nearer than 40 yards from his presence. He was generous as an employer, though, rewarding his servants with donkeys and umbrellas.

Augusta, Lady Llanover, in a chapter by Prys Morgan in The Invention of Tradition edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger

Though born in Monmouthshire, which was not then in Wales, Augusta Waddington became the arch promulgator of ancient Welsh culture in language, literature and music. She performed at eisteddfods and took the bardic name Gweynen Gwent, and where traditional forms were elusive, she made them up; she and friends invented a form of characteristic Welsh dress which was in fact an amalgamation of various peasant styles. The Dame Waleses one finds in gift shops are largely her creation. "She invented", says Morgan, "a costume for her male servants at Llanover Court, the harpist being in a weird raiment, half-minstrel Scottish Highlander." Lord Llanover (her husband Benjamin Hall, the government minister after whom Big Ben is named) "was not interested in wearing fancy dress, so the men folk of Wales were spared."

Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol, in As We Were, by EF Benson (and in Jowett, a Portrait, by GC Faber)

The most formidable figure in Oxford, Jowett, though often kindly, could be coldly forbidding. A young man with whom he had walked 15 miles without a word being exchanged said, as they entered Tewkesbury, "I believe there are more dogs in the streets than people this morning!", to which Jowett replied: "If you have nothing more sensible to observe, you had better be silent." Yet the poet Swinburne, a wild, self-indulgent extrovert at the furthest end of the eccentric scale, had licence to say whatever he liked, however insulting. Jowett doted on Florence Nightingale, whom he vainly aspired to marry, but detested the French, asking students what legend was written over the entrance to Hell, telling them before they could answer that it was: "Ici on parle Francais."