It is just over half a century since G. K. Chesterton warned his readers not to insist too urgently on the splendours of Dickens’s last works lest it should be discovered that they were not true admirers of the novelist. Chesterton celebrated the Dickens of the stage-coach and the spirit of Merry Christmas and charity: that aspect of the novelist which Mr Walter Allen has termed the jolly Dickens, Dickens in fairy-land. It is not surprising that he had but faint praise for the later, darker novels. Most recent critics of the novelist, however, have tended to direct their attention chiefly to the later works and to occupy themselves with the task of elucidating and illuminating what is sometimes spoken of as his powerful and impressive rendering of evil and, by contrast, the weakness of his portrayal of goodness.

This contrast, and the problem it poses for the critical reader, is strikingly apparent at the very beginning of Dicken’s career. In the early novel Oliver Twist it is the vision of the underworld, the world of the workhouse and Fagin’s lair that most of us remember. The world of the Brownlows and the Maylies fails to grip the imagination. Probably the least thoughtful and least satisfactory way’ of elucidating this weakness is to suggest simply that what we arc confronted with here are characters who fail to impress because they are too good to be true. This explanation appears to be irrepressible; it is capable of appearing, usually in the form of a brief aside, even in the work of critics who have in fact much more carefully considered explanations to offer.