ABSTRACT
This chapter examines nonhuman nature in the early novels of Charles Dickens. Although it has been over a century since Louis Cazamian linked Dickens to the idea of the “social novel,” critics still treat Dickens as that novelist whose ethical concerns focus on interrelations between humans: in other words, the “social” realm, particularly the manifold human interactions associated with London as world metropolis and as represented in Dickens’s large, and generally more highly regarded, later novels. This essay looks at Dickens’s works before he became identifi ed particularly as an urban novelist in order to investigate the relation between his works and the nonhuman world. Read ecocritically, Dickens’s early fi ctions reveal a nonanthropocentric understanding of the human’s place in the world and a critique of the centrality of the human in the social theories that are still profoundly with us.
