Dickensian Dimensions: A Transatlantic Dialogue

Abstract: “Dickensian Dimensions” makes use of Dickens’s manuscript revisions to uncover the extra dimensions of emotional depth and temporal complexity that his sentences acquire in the immediate midst of composition. When the effects of those little changes were offered to a group of serious ordinary readers in the UK, their responses to selected passages from David Copperfield showed how much the tiny revisions could matter emotionally. The second part of the essay considers revised passages from Dickens’s next first-person narrator, Esther Summerson of Bleak House . We suggest that Esther’s apparently coy evasions can be more sympathetically read as writing problems stemming from her existential situation as a virtual non-person.