Among Charles Dickens' plenitude gifts--Oh! I gave up on the War and Peace re-read: boring; it just trails on and on.--among Dickens' gifts, the story-telling that Nabakov thought him best, the descriptive writing that "transports" (always my word for it) one to the scene, the fine drawing of some of his characters, the impressionistic caricatures of others, the humor in his writing--there is quite a lot; among those however is one that I didn't put together at first: he sees the inner self, reads the minds of some of his characters. All of the rest one can chalk up to the great novelist's expansive imagination and keen eye and Dickens had both in spades and honed his ocular ability working as a court reporter in London. Of that I wish to say that you never have met a person with so keen an ear and eye as a court reporter. They have to pay acute attention to get every word that a speaker speaks and the eye is a great aid to hearing. They have to be omniscient. Lawyers and judges speak over one another and have tunnel vision; they see only their auditor. The court reporter has to hear and see the whole room, court or deposition, at once. They read facial expressions and body language, they make sense of a speaker's mannerisms. It can be understood at once how work as a court reporter can be of great assistance to a novelist and no aid whatsoever to reading the inner dialog of a person. They have great vision but it is not X-ray vision.

Dickens had both. I have encountered it twice. First in David Copperfield as he recounts young Copperfield's extreme, but difficult to pinpoint, discomfiture at being slowly, casually interrogated by Uriah Heep and his mother over a dinner to which they invited him at their house. And again in Bleak House, which I am re-reading after the failed W&P venture, in Esther Summerson's confused vexation at Mrs. Woodcourt's ("would" "court") confidence-taking as she tries to interest Esther in her son.

Dickens has his faults. "Volumnia," his invented name for one of the lesser Dedlocks, applies to Dickens himself as storyteller. Bleak House needn't have been 800 pages long; it is weakened by such volume, the thread of the story is dropped from the forefront almost out of sight at times so that Dickens can draw another character for us. The story becomes baroque with all of the embroidery. His facility as storyteller, what he is uber alles in Nabakov's judgment, is tarnished by subplots: there is no need, to cite a singular instance, for spontaneous combustion to besoil--as it did! compelling Dickens to defend the phenomenon as real in a preface--Bleak House. I was always a little insulted by Nabakov's judgment. Storyteller? Like he's some wandering gypsy? I have always considered Dickens' descriptive writing his hallmark. He does not write women well, that is a universal criticism. The ridiculous Dora Spenlow in Copperfield--so bad that I am convinced Dickens killed her off deliberately upon realization of how absurd a character he had made of her. Why didn't Dickens simply erase Dora from draft when his mortification set in? Because some of Dickens' novels, including Copperfield and Bleak House, were first published in serialized form in magazines. That is, Dora had already been published. If he had second thoughts, as I believe he did, he would have had no choice but to kill the character. As a counter-example to Dora however I think Lady Dedlock is drawn in the round; I think he captures her exceedingly well. Lady Dedlock is the anti-Dora as a Dickens female character.

So yes, Dickens has faults, they are not near as numerous as his merits, and one of the most supreme of the latter is his striking ability, unknown to the undersigned as a trait, to see into the soul of one of his characters and to hear the internal dialogue. More than a storyteller, more than a great picture painter with words, Charles Dickens was a very great writer.