Note 1 to Chapter 5 of the author's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter which Clarendon Press published in 1972. It has been included in the Victorian Web with the kind permission of the author and of the Clarendon Press, which retains copyright.
In her Preface to the Oxford Illustrated edition of this novel, Kathleen Tillotson points out the way the arrangement of the novel "conveys the irony of the common assumption that private lives are immune from public events" (p. xi). A similar thematic wading is advanced by Harold F. Folland. Folland sees the main ethical theme as "the evil of action divorced from responsibility" (p. 408). Although the novel has not received very extensive or generally very interesting critical treatment, the following discussions are excellent: Jack Lindsay; A. E. Dyson; and the chapter in Steven Marcus's From Pickwick to Dombey, pp, 169-212.
Last modified: 1 May 2001