It does not seem that Dickens' use of point of view has attracted much attention. The general limits of the subject have been fixed, but what lies between them has seldom been considered. Those limits are pretty-well determined by his dates. Like most other predecessors of George Eliot, Dickens is pre-eminently an objective novelist: hardly to be surpassed in the external treatment of his characters, but quite inadequate when he deals with their inner lives. George Eliot herself has stated this view as well as anyone.
We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies. But… he scarcely ever passes from the humorous and external to the emotional and tragic, without becoming as transcendent in his unreality as he was a moment before in his artistic truthfulness.
Essays (Edinburgh—London: Blackwood, 1885), p. 194 (from the essay “Natural History of German Life”).