ABSTRACT
In a letter to John Forster, his friend and biographer, Dickens commented upon the visual nature of his literary style: “When . . . I sit down to my book, some beneficent power shows it all to me and tempts me to be interested, and I don’t invent it-really do not-but see it, and write it down.” 1 Dickens appears to be describing the inspiration of his literary pictorialism, that is, his frequent tendency to arrest his narratives and elaborate upon scenic visual details that create or suggest thematic, metaphoric, or narrative meanings. This tendency towards literary pictorialism has long been recognized as a salient characteristic of Dickens’s art, and critics have made efforts to identify some of the influences that may have shaped this visual style.2 Clearly Dickens always possessed an extremely sharp awareness of the details of physical settings. No doubt his training as a reporter sharpened these innate gifts for observation. But few critics, and these mostly in an indirect manner, have pointed out the probable influence of contemporary artistic practices upon his developing style-especially the methods of Victorian narrative painters.3
