Dickens and Personification (Critical Essay‪)‬

George Ford wrote that at the height of Dickens's career, there was a general growing appreciation of the aesthetics of fiction along with a growing demand for realism in the novel, which created a tendency for critics to misvalue the developments in Dickens's own writing (128). Though Dickens employed many non-realist techniques, one feature of his writing that might have been off-putting for a critic demanding greater realism was his frequent use of personification. (1) What figurative device is less conducive to realism than personification, so deeply connected to unrealistic genres such as allegory and fable? Although Dickens was fully aware of his fanciful use of personification in his fiction, he also used the device frequently in his personal discourse. This tendency surfaces early in Dickens's career, sometimes with amusing irony. Referring to an essay for Bentley's Miscellany, Dickens wrote to Theodore Martin, "The Dying Student is also at the Printer's. I will look him up, and entomb him in the February number" (Letters 1: 479). The personification of a piece of writing is not remarkably original, but to transform publication into entombment is. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe has examined personification in Dickens, but his approach is to discuss abstractions made concrete, such as Mendicity. He also makes an interesting observation about how alert Dickens was to the whole idea of personification, by pointing out that Dickens converts an idle personification--the allegory of the pointing Roman on Tulkinghorn's ceiling in Bleak House--to a functional one (232-3).