Early in 2020, as society shut down, I retreated behind closed doors with Charles Dickens, who kept me company and cheered me up throughout the pandemic. Carried along by narratives that Dickens thought of as speedy locomotives and warmed by a combustible imagination that he compared to an industrial forge, I soon felt no need for tame timed circuits of the local park, and I even stopped fretting about the imminent end of the world. But although Dickens saved from me one disease, he infected me with another: escaping Covid-19, I contracted an incurable monomania instead.
Emerging after the last lockdown, I buttonholed any friend who would listen and began to claim that Dickens contained the whole of literature. His novels made everyone else’s seem puny. Larger even than the newly metropolitan London he described, their scale is planetary: looking down from on high in A Tale of Two Cities, he ponders “the feeble shining of this earth of ours” and marvels at the “greatnesses and littlenesses” crammed on to it. Those swarming creatures are not exclusively human. At a country estate in Bleak House, Dickens overhears “motions of fancy” in the barnyard, where stabled horses conspire to corrupt a pony, a dim-witted mastiff dozing in the sun is puzzled by the moving shadows, and a turkey frets about the coming of Christmas. Inanimate objects also qualify as characters, and Sketches by Boz floats a theory about the physiognomy of brass door-knockers, which mould themselves into portraits of the house-owners.
