Charles Dickens’s Realism and the Romantic Essayists

Through a series of textual comparisons between Leigh Hunt’s essays and Charles Dickens’s early city sketches, this article uncovers a neglected genealogy for Dickens’s realistic depictions of the ordinary subject. From establishing Dickens’s debt to the Romantic essayists more generally, I go on to elicit a key distinction. In the essayists’ representations, detail conduces to the construction of a self; in Dickens’s, it signals a close attention to the other. Detail, then, is the marker of the ethical relation modeled in Dickens’s style of ordinariness. Foregrounding this style, I reassert Dickens’s contribution to the developing realism of the mid-nineteenth century.