I've just finished Claire Tomalin's excellent biography of Charles Dickens and, once again, the thought has struck me how little probability there is in his novels of change. In spite of the range of his characters and the invention in the novels, everything is condemned to be as it will be from the very beginning.

This is typified by the names he chose for his characters and, once named, that's them set up for the duration of the plot. Imagine you've just been born into a Dickens novel. There's the Great Author, bending over your bassinet. Here's the subsequent dialogue:

You: "Hey, Charlie, what's my name?"

Dickens: "Wackford Squeers'"

You: "Oh great! Wackford Squeers - thank you very much! Haven't you anything a bit better."

Dickens: "Oh, very well. How about Gradgrind?"

You: "Oh, for fuck's sake!"

Of course there's some character development in Dickens but the Good are condemned generally to be Good and the Bad are generally condemned to be Bad.

It's striking that Dickens showed great compassion for the poor and thought that the better-off in society should do more for them - but he never, as far as I'm aware, agitated or campaigned for the law to be changed to make conditions better. He accepted society and its hierarchies and divisions for what it was, and hoped that more compassionate attitudes to the poor, rather than legislation, would make things better for them. For the Law and Parliament, he had nothing but contempt.

Will (Uriah Heep) Fly