The Intentional World of Dickens's Fiction

Abstract

A LTHOUGH DICKENS'S LANGUAGE has a number of distinctive characteristics, there is probably no aspect of it which is more striking or more puzzling than his frequent use of metaphors of transformation. Dickens's propensity for attributing a kind of life to inanimate things (certain rickety old houses looked like the last result of the great mansions breeding in-and-in) and for rendering characters as depersonalized objects (a woman looked as if she had been thatched by an unskilful labourer) is the paradigmatic manifestation of the vivid eccentricity of his descriptive prose.' But while most readers concur with Jerome Thale's observation that Dickens has the power to transform and create a new vision of things through metaphor,2 there is little agreement as to the underlying significance of this linguistically embodied vision. In fact, these metaphors of transformation raise a fundamental question about the nature of Dickens's fiction: does the author change and interchange the components of the ordinary perceptual world in order to create the effects of the carnival sideshow, temporary amusement and astonishment, or do these transformations provide a valid insight into the special conditions of being which obtain in Dickens's fictional world? The implications of this question are far reaching. If Dickens's metaphors of transformation are to be understood simply as enter-