By way of preparing to write a brief review of Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch, a novel which many reviewers have referred to as “Dickensian,” I have returned to some things that Chesterton says about Dickens, in order to get a sharper sense of just what is meant when we say “Dickensian.”

If anything, the word “Dickensian” would seem to refer to any sprawling work of fiction set in a modern, urban center involving multiple characters and an overall comic arc. But upon hearing such a description, I think Chesterton would only chuckle and reply, “While this may be a fitting definition of “Dickensian,” it fails to do justice to what is at the heart of Dickens.”

For the heart of Dickens, Chesterton would go on to say, is first of all a large and democratic heart, that penetrates into the grandeur of even the most miserable human being. “Wherever humanity is he would have us face it and make something of it, swallow it with a holy cannibalism, and assimilate it with the digestion of a giant” (“The Dickensian”).

The heart of Dickens is also a mythologizing heart, a maker of god- or fairy-like comic characters who live “statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves.” Dickens’ aim, avers Chesterton, “is another aim altogether to those of the modern novelists who trace the alchemy of experience and the autumn tints of character. He is there, like the common people of all ages, to make deities; he is there…to exaggerate life in the direction of life” (from Charles Dickens).