Imagination All Compact: How Did Charles Dickens Compose His Novels?

The novels of Charles Dickens have fascinated generations of readers and still engage academic research. Yet while much has been done on the wide range of singular characters that Dickens created, the social ills that he lashed, and the thematic clusters pervading his work, some aspects of his writing have so far not been considered. The narrative structure of the novels is increasingly gaining attention, but what of their so very characteristic texture? How did Dickens achieve colourful fictions that comprise a variety of subjects, settings, and plot lines and yet remain coherent and convincing? The present study attempts to tackle this problem by offering a new approach to Dickens's work. The creative process from which the texts derived is here supposed to embrace two complementary compositional modes, a dynamic imaginative impulse on the one hand, and a restraining, ordering faculty on the other. The serial publication of the titles and their reception by the reading public allowed the author to fully explore the potential of any narrative situation, which would eventually resolve itself into a plausible line of development. As an in-depth analysis of several of his novels shows, remnants of the variants that had floated before him can still be discerned in the texts, testifying to the boundless imaginative power of Charles Dickens.