ABSTRACT
The commonplaces in the life of all the nations of the earth, these matter-of-fact ingredients, were converted by him into something imaginative, fanciful, entrancing. He flooded the grey mass with sunshine. Dickens was not ashamed of making a simple wage-earner into one of his heroes. His enthusiastic delight in the commonplace was amazing, and no less astonishing was his appreciation of quite worthless and old-fashioned things and the small change of life. He wished to teach this poem of everyday life to all and sundry, but especially to those condemned to pass the whole of their existence in the realm of the commonplace. The whole of this community, with its dwellings and furnishings, its medley of trades and callings and professions, its limitless mishmash of emotions, became a cosmos under his hand, became an integral whole, with its own stars, and its own household gods.
