ABSTRACT
Dickens enthusiastically created more memorable characters than any other English novelist. George Newlin, in his Everyone in Dickens (1995), calculates that there are ‘a total of 3,592 name usages, and nearly that many named characters’ in Dickens’s fiction. When generic characters and the names of historical, mythical, biblical and other non-Dickensian characters are included, the total, according to Newlin, is ‘13,143 listings plus 95 documented, unused coinages’ (I, p. xx). This Who’s Who in Dickens includes about 1,650 personages (and a few animals and birds) from the main body of Dickens’s work: the fiction and essays, as collected in the Oxford Illustrated Dickens and similar editions, and the plays. I have tried to include everyone of interest and importance and hope I have not omitted anyone’s favourite character. My aim has been to give fuller accounts of the major characters than are found in many reference books, noting some of Dickens’s possible sources and referring, in a limited way, to critical opinion, especially when questions of influence and interpretation have arisen (as in his depictions of Mr Boffin, Miss Mowcher, Riah and Harold Skimpole).
