# Dickens — Aspects of the Novel character guide

> Dickens in Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster.

**Role:** supporting

**First appearance:** 0003-i-introductory

## Snapshot

The great conjuror of flat characters, whose immense vitality makes types like Pickwick vibrate as if they had lives of their own.

## Who they are

Forster uses Dickens to argue that flatness is not failure: his people can be summed up in a sentence, yet they carry a wonderful feeling of human depth. The trick, Forster suspects, is Dickens's own surplus of life, which galvanizes the caricatures into motion. He matters because he complicates the easy hierarchy of round over flat, showing that a novelist's force can make even a gramophone-thin figure seem to weigh something.

## Links

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