ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Dickens attitudes towards beauty, together with the references in his writing. The more this singular noun appears to be at odds with the diversity of its objects. When dealing with questions of aesthetic value, Dickens enjoyed adopting a tone of hearty common sense, which at times verged on the perversely literal-minded. From the start of his career, he had shown an uncanny knack for retrieving unexpected moments of beauty from the unlikeliest of places. This is a common pattern in Dickens's fiction, where the fact that 'beauty' can refer both to objective attributes and subjective evaluations represents more than a philosophical or semantic problem. However, Dickens and his readers already had an example before them of the Line of Beauty working its way into a narrative structure. The appeal of Sleeping Beauty to Dickens and his contemporaries can also be viewed as part of a much larger cultural preoccupation with the relationship between beauty and time.
