The unique fictional world of Charles Dickens

Friend WS initiated a little online colloquy about Dickens: WS admitted that he'd been dismissive of Dickens for many years, essentially for his whole adult lifetime as a reader, but now - WS now retired and evidently has the time to sit back once again and embark on a really long Victorian literary voyage - he discovers - not too late! - that there's greatness in Dickens after all. I think he especially loved re-reading Great Expectations. WS has been a big influence on my reading over the years - we started out together as under-employed academics and each took very different paths, both of which led us away from reading and writing about literature, at least professionally - but WS has always encouraged me to read and re-read James, to my pleasure (though I'm not sure I could have take on The Golden Bowl or Wings of the Dove), and ditto George Eliot - though I've not read as much of her as I'd like to and always pledge to get back to Middlemarch yet am put off by its length (and by the crappy condition of the pb that I own - stupid reasoning I admit). Someday I will. So it's great to see the he has re-discovered Dickens: what seemed foolish and sentimental when he, when we, were younger readers, and what may have seemed broad comedy or over-the-top caricature now seems wise and humane, and the sentiment seems openly devastating. Several of WS's friends have weighed in, including one daunting e-mailer who loves the late James novels as well as Dickens and the other monumentals: I think many of WS's correspondents must have taught Dickens et al. a # of times because their grasp and recollection of numerous plot points and character detail is far beyond what I can manage even on books I'm in the midst of - a huge advantage of teaching, I think: it makes us better readers. WS raised an important point in one of his posts, commenting on the contrast between the world that Dickens creates which seems to be vivid and real and complete and his utter sentimentality and attraction to coincidence - obvious authorial contrivances. This I think is at the heart of Dickens's style and his excellence: pure fantasy becomes acceptable and credible because it is contained, in his fiction, within a world of seeming realism: he is the opposite of a realist like Zola or a naturalist like Flaubert - his universe, though it may seem to be a realistic imitation of 19th-century London and in fact is inseparable from our understanding and knowledge of that world and society, is actually complete fictive and imaginative - his world is uniquely his own.