Our Thirty-Five Favorite Characters in Dickens

A Celebration of the Greatest Character Writer in English

“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would no doubt be justified in rearing his head to the stars, remembering that Sherlock Holmes is the only really familiar figure in modern fiction. But let him droop that head again with a gentle sadness, remembering that if Sherlock Holmes is the only familiar figure in modern fiction Sherlock Holmes is also the only familiar figure in the Sherlock Holmes tales. Not many people could say offhand what was the name of the owner of Silver Blaze, or whether Mrs. Watson was dark or fair. But if Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes stories, every character in them would have been equally arresting and memorable. A Sherlock Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his cab. If Dickens brought in a man merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch or two, and made him a giant. Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of Mr. Cyrus Bantam, though he merely passes across the stage, is almost as vivid to us as Mr. Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick. The young man with the lumpy forehead, who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s foreign gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself. They appear only for a fragment of time, but they belong to eternity. We have them only for an instant, but they have us for ever.”

~G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study

Robert William Buss, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, your ‘umble correspondents have been discussing a nearly impossible subject: our favorite Dickensian characters. “Nearly impossible” only because Dickens has the most enviable ability to make even the most minor characters memorable forever. There is no rhyme or reason to the order here; more Flora Finchingesque stream of consciousness. Nor is the list comprehensive, nor is it a list of the “best”—in which we could never leave out Miss Havisham, Madame Defarge, Mr. Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Bradley Headstone, and innumerable others—but these are the favorites that we reference or quote constantly.

And so, as Mr Snevellicci might say, “The characters—I love ‘em, every one!”

Mr. Jingle (The Pickwick Papers)

Rach: One could say that Boze and I fell in love over Mr. Jingle, the utterly charming—dashing, very—con man who speaks in a staccato train of semi-connected thoughts. When Boze and I first started texting, it began with Jingle’s first line in the novel: “What’s the fun?” Jingle breezily tells one farfetched story after another—with nearly the disconnect of a kind of Flora Finching but without the honesty—all of which are stories that he apparently lived through. Don’t we love a good storyteller, even if we know in our heart of hearts that he’s a sham?

Our favorite con man

Mr Wilkins Micawber (David Copperfield)

Boze: Is there a more indelible image in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece than that of Mr Micawber—not half an hour after penning a letter in which he declares himself irretrievably ruined—sitting in a carriage, hat askew, placidly eating walnuts from a paper bag, “with a bottle sticking out of his breast pocket”? Dickens drew on memories of his improvident father in depicting the travails of the Micawbers, often imprisoned for debt but always buoyed by their confidence that “something will turn up.” But in the alchemy of Dickens’s imagination, what had been dark and horrifying becomes comical and strange. As a child I was charmed by his eloquence, without quite grasping that he was a terrible father; more recently I named a beloved cat (with a habit of roaming from door to door seeking food) after him. “I will never desert him!” says Mrs Micawber, and neither will we.

Sophy & Traddles (David Copperfield)

Rach: For the best friends, the second fiddles, Tommy Traddles would be right near the top. Herbert Pocket is another delightful example of this type, but Traddles has him beat, and his delightful relationship with Sophy is a model of a happy marriage—one jovially beset by Sophy’s many siblings and relations—and there aren’t too many of those explored in Dickens.

Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers)

Rach: Sam Weller is undoubtably one of the most marvelous creations in literature, his cockney unflappability and canny charm utterly captivating with every encounter. He’s near the top of my list for the greatest male characters in all of Dickens. Utterly quotable, too; one can find a cheeky, often half-mad Wellerism for most occasions worth mentioning. Pickwick and Sam are the ideal of the now-recognizable master-servant relationship/trope in fiction, predating Frodo & Sam, Jeeves & Wooster, or Wimsey & Bunter. They are the veritable Quixote and Sancho for England, as John Forster wrote in his biography of his own best friend, Dickens.

The Boy Who Sucks on Spikes (Bleak House)

Boze: In one of the bleakest chapters in Bleak House, our heroine Esther and friends visit the Neckett siblings, three orphans, the oldest of whom, Charley, barely in her teens, is struggling to feed her two siblings (aged one and five) by working as a laundress. Before the gang descends on Bell Yard, where the children live, we’re given some illuminating exposition by a “very hideous boy” whom they find sucking on the spike of a wicket gate. Having demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of the Necketts’ situation, he returns to sucking on his spike and never appears again in the book. Somehow he is one its best characters.

Rach: This is the perfect example of the “streaky bacon” technique in Dickens—this is eccentric, funny, and terribly sad, as though he hasn’t had a good meal in a while. Brilliant.

Mr. Mantalini (Nicholas Nickleby)

Rach: He lights up a room. A bit of a Jingle in his con man capability, he is so brilliant. Boze and I quote Mr. Mantalini all the time, adopting for one another his own florid, ridiculous compliments: “My essential juice of pineapple!” “My apple streudel!” “My soul’s delight!” The ultimate Mr. Mantalini was played by John McEnery in my favorite thing ever to be put on film: the 8 ½ hour 1982 RSC stage production of Nicholas Nickleby.

John McEnery chewing the scene.

James Steerforth and Rosa Dartle (David Copperfield)

Boze: The inimitable Steerforth is not only my favorite character in my favorite novel, but almost certainly my favorite character in all of Dickens. Reading the book at the age of ten, I was perplexed by David’s loyalty to Steerforth and how that loyalty went largely unrewarded—my first experience of an unreliable narrator. David clearly wants us to love Steerforth but Dickens wants us to think that there’s something shifty about him, and that tension between narrator and author is inherently fascinating. It all culminates in Chapter 55, “Tempest,” which I thought then, and think now, is the best thing anyone has written. Rosa Dartle, who seems to have been in love with Steerforth—and at whom he threw a hammer when they were both young, permanently scarring her face—is one of Dickens’s great female characters, radiating a fury and intensity that make her utterly compelling.

Rach: Still haunted by “Tempest,” some of the most glorious writing in literature, along with the second paragraph of Bleak House. And Steerforth is a fascinating cad.

Mr. F’s Aunt (Little Dorrit)

“You can’t make a head and brains out of a brass knob with nothing in it. You couldn’t do it when your Uncle George was living; much less when he’s dead.”

Rach: “There’s mile-stones on the Dover road” is one of the random proclamations Mr. F’s Aunt is always making, entirely out of context, that Boze and I have adopted. Why does she have a mysterious aversion to Arthur Clennam? I love her. I need her randomness in my life.

Flora Finching (Little Dorrit)

Rach: What utterly brilliant streams of consciousness are all the words uttered by Clennam’s old flame, Flora Finching. I love her attempts to re-seduce Arthur; her living in the conceit that they are still an item after twenty years apart and a great deal of change in both—perhaps a product of reading too much Mrs. Radcliffe? She is a brilliantly loveable character. Funny, occasionally a bit heartbreaking. (Check out Miriam Margolyes playing her to perfection in the 1987 film.)

All the Ghosts (A Christmas Carol)

Boze: Half the genius of Dickens’s great festive novella is how its characters, both human and otherworldly, seem to have sprung fully formed from the collective unconscious. In reading his descriptions of the ghosts one is occasionally struck by their strangeness, how Dickens invests them with imaginative flourishes that no other writer, living or dead, could have conceived. Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner, unravels the white shroud round his head so that his jaw falls to the floor. The Ghost of Christmas Past is described as being both man and woman, both old and young, and having a disturbing number of arms and legs (which has made him / her a difficult ghost to depict onscreen). The Ghost of Christmas Present is decked out like Father Christmas in a green robe which conceals the horrible children Ignorance and Want. The story wouldn’t be half so effective at warming the heart if it weren’t also spectacularly creepy.

by John Leech, from Victorian Web

Miss Betsey Trotwood & Mr. Dick (David Copperfield)

Rach: One of Dickens’s greatest female characters, Miss Betsey is the prickly, curmudgeonly aunt who really comes through for you when you need her. Her decision to help David, and her verbal take-down of Mr. Murdstone, is one of the most satisfying passages in Dickens. Mr. Dick, perhaps due to an intellectual or developmental disability, was nearly institutionalized—except for the wonderful Miss Betsey. He is one of Dickens’s most genuinely loveable characters, with his obsession about Charles I, his kindness to David, and the wisdom that he expresses in his own utterly unique way. I need these two in my life always.

The Gentleman in Smallclothes (aka Mr Cucumber) (Nicholas Nickleby)

Boze: Nicholas Nickleby is quite a plot-heavy book, featuring smarmy aristocrats, hidden lineage, jovial theatrical impresarios, damsels imprisoned into bad marriages and several perfectly orchestrated comeuppances. In the midst of these machinations there’s a strange interlude involving Mrs Nickleby, a chatty widow in the mode of Flora Finching, and a gentleman next door who demonstrates his passion for her by throwing whole vegetables over a stone wall into the garden. He boasts, in a monologue that lasts nearly two pages, of having “estates, ma’am ... jewels, lighthouses, fish-ponds, a whalery of my own in the North Sea, and several oyster-beds of great profit in the Pacific Ocean.” Mr Cucumber, as we call him, is very dear to us for personal reasons: I recited his monologue to Rach when I proposed, to which she replied, “Barkis is willin’!” through tears. A friend and her kids threw cucumbers at our wedding.

Master Humphrey (Master Humphrey’s Clock/The Old Curiosity Shop)

Rach: There is something representative about this solitary old gentleman, for me, of the themes of Memory and loneliness that abound in Dickens. He and the friends he meets with periodically are worn with their years and regrets, but still possess the youthful spirit that we find in Pickwick, in Brownlow, in the Cheeryble brothers, in Mr. Lorry and Mr. Grewgious, in Newman Noggs (who should also be on this list, but we have so much Nickleby representation already!) and in all of the benevolent benefactors and self-effacing gentleman who retain compassionate and curious hearts. It was a rather quixotic venture to try and get the public interested in this solitary old bachelor—and hence Master Humphrey virtually disappeared shortly after the start of The Old Curiosity Shop, for which it was to be a kind of “frame” story—but I do love Dickens for trying.

“We are men of secluded habits, with something of a cloud upon our early fortunes, whose enthusiasm, nevertheless, has not cooled with age, whose spirit of romance is not yet quenched, who are content to ramble through the world in a pleasant dream, rather than ever waken again to its harsh realities. We are alchemists who would extract the essence of perpetual youth from dust and ashes, tempt coy Truth in many light and airy forms from the bottom of her well, and discover one crumb of comfort or one grain of good in the commonest and least-regarded matter that passes through our crucible…”

The “Goroo!” Man (David Copperfield)

Boze: On his eighty-mile trek to Dover in pursuit of his formidable aunt, young David is swindled, robbed and beaten by nearly everyone he meets. The most terrifying such encounter involves a dodgy shopkeeper, “a dreadful old man to look at, in a filthy flannel waistcoat, and smelling terribly of rum,” who seizes David by the hair and cries, “Oh, my eyes and limbs! Oh, my lungs and liver! Oh, goroo, goroo!” The manner in which he says this—screwing it out of himself like a corkscrew, his eyes at each utterance threatening to burst from his head—is vivid and unsettling. “Mr Goroo,” as he’s known in our house, was a pop culture sensation well into the Edwardian era—one is constantly stumbling on allusions to the curious gentleman in books from that era.

Amy Dorrit & Mr. Clennam (Little Dorrit)

Rach: Clennam remains my favorite male romantic lead, and a kind of beau ideal: a self-effacing, gentle, genuinely kind man who tries to help a poor, obscure young woman who has lived all her life in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison due to her father’s financial misfortunes. Clennam, fortyish and having just returned from twenty years abroad attending to a family business that he hated, feels as though he has somehow missed his path in life. Still, in spite of a melancholia that makes him very relatable, he is dogged in his pursuit of the secret that his parents were keeping from him, though he fears it might indicate some terrible injustice done by his family, particularly to the Dorrits.

This leads naturally to my favorite female romantic lead: the quiet and sensitive Amy Dorrit, “child of the Marshalsea,” who manages to think and act and work for her entire, impoverished family, while dealing with the mental vulnerability and decline of her father, a “gentleman” who has been so long in the Marshalsea prison that he loses touch with reality, himself, and his own daughter in his efforts to maintain a veneer of gentility. One can never mistake her quietness for weakness; she’s imaginative, brave, self-effacing, determined.

Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Boze: A somewhat controversial choice, as Nell has become synonymous with the free-flowing sentimentality of Dickens’s early period, but I’ll defend her. Certainly there are Dickens heroines who suffer from a lack of personality—one thinks of the dull Madeline Bray in Nicholas Nickleby and Dora Spenlow. But Nell demonstrates agency and courage in battling the demonic Quilp and her grandfather’s gambling habits (an inventive and nightmarish conflict that sees him behaving like a proto-Gollum). As the sane central figure in a carnivalesque world of rogues, dogsbodies, puppeteers and waxwork owners, Nell is necessarily more ordinary by contrast, but no more so than David Copperfield in the book of that name. Taking into account the full arc of Dickens’s career, she reads at times like an early version of the great Amy Dorrit.

The Marchioness and Dick Swiveller (The Old Curiosity Shop)

Rach: Among the great unlikely friendships/relationships, we must put that of Dick & the Marchioness near the top. How can one not completely fall for the unexpected connection between the dissolute, careless clerk (perhaps an early, comical prototype of the Sydney Carton character, along with Lord Verisopht in Nicholas Nickleby) and the orphaned drudge—really, a prisoner—of the Brass siblings? Between them, they could start their own private detective agency, and we’d gladly follow them through all of their adventures.

Miss Jenny Wren (Our Mutual Friend)

Rach: Our Mutual Friend, for me, has not one but three of Dickens’s greatest female heroines. But I highlight the quirky dolls’ dressmaker, Miss Jenny Wren. Jenny has managed, since she was little more than a child and in spite of her physical disability, to make a living for herself and her alcoholic father. She’s utterly quirky, funny, unique, spirited, intelligent and canny…and even, a mystic. Her relationship with Mr. Riah, Lizzie, and even Eugene is utterly marvelous. She’s my favorite female Dickens character, and one of my personal heroines.

The Goblin of Avignon (Pictures from Italy)

Boze: We might well have included the Goblins from “The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton” on this list, but the most memorable “goblin” in the Dickens canon is an elderly woman whom Dickens meets in his travels through France, as narrated in Pictures from Italy. Residing in the Palace of the Popes, where she claims to have been born, she gives tours of the subterranean torture dungeons with a relish which seems both to alarm and impress Dickens. “With her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up, in the middle of the chamber, describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows. Thus it ran round! cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs.” Less attention is paid to Dickens’s sketches, travelogues and letters (totaling twelve volumes in the Pilgrim edition) than to his novels, but even if he had never written a word of fiction he would have numbered among the great Victorian writers.

Mr. Bucket (Bleak House)

Rach: In Mr. Bucket, we have one of the first detectives in fiction, and one of the greatest. Using for inspiration a certain Inspector Field with whom Dickens tagged along as an observer (see “On Duty with Inspector Field” in Reprinted Pieces), Mr. Bucket, while being utterly quirky and unpredictable—occasionally, cruel, though with the intent of doing some good, although sometimes his motives are quite obscure—he has an almost godlike influence over a number of characters, with an unflappability that makes him comfortable in any society, from that of Sir Leicester Dedlock, to the destitute of Tom-All-Alone’s. You feel as though he’d be a great bloke to have a pint with, as long as you’re not a suspect in a murder case.

Captain Cuttle and Mr. Toots (Dombey & Son)

Rach: “Stand by!” “When found, make a note of.” One of the things I love most about Dickens are some of the unlikely friendships formed between very different characters in different life situations. I love that Floy Dombey, in her distress, finds refuge and protection with the avuncular sea dog who has stayed true to his old friend, Sol Gills, and has been looking after his nautical shop—The Wooden Midshipman—during his disappearance. There is a “found family” in the Midshipman, with Cuttle, Walter, Sol Gills, Floy, and Mr. Toots—the latter being one of those delightfully besotted and utterly goodhearted fellows who are doomed not to get the girl—at least, not the one he’d had his heart set on for so long.

The Fat Boy (Pickwick Papers)

Boze: “Damn that boy! He’s gone to asleep again!” Let me preface by saying: you could not get away with writing a book today in which a prominent minor character is dubbed “The Fat Boy” and the joke is that he has narcolepsy. Maybe that’s for the best. But the Fat Boy, whose name is Joe, who eats great quantities of pies, whose snores are prodigious and who sleeps “as soundly as if the roaring of cannon were his ordinary lullaby,” who astonishes Sam Weller and is threatened with horse-whipping by the roguish Jingle, who shows his gratitude towards the deaf old lady by saying, “I wants to make your flesh creep!”—this young man, I say, embodies something of the eternal spring in which Pickwick takes place. The book is, somehow, all the more comforting for his presence in it. There’s even a medical condition named after him, which further demonstrates the cultural ubiquity of Dickens (and the greatness of the Fat Boy).

The “Fat Boy,” by Sol Eytinge. From Victorian Web.

John Jasper (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Rach: One of Dickens’s best, most disturbing, most fascinating creations, John Jasper, for me, came to surpass even the great Bradley Headstone as my favorite Dickensian villain. I love him. And he is utterly terrifying. Here in Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, we have one who would probably have been a very Gollum-like character: Jasper is, during the “day,” a respectable choirmaster of Cloisterham Cathedral; he seems not to entirely know, remember, or accept what he becomes under the influence of opium. Or is he more aware of his violent intentions than he seems to be? Did he kill Edwin Drood and frame Neville Landless, or did Edwin merely…disappear? Was Jasper, if guilty, fully aware of what he’d done? His is one of the great psychological portraits of envy, dissatisfaction, and obsession.

Dick Datchery/Bazzard (The Mystery of Edwin Drood)

Rach: One of the great Droodish mysteries, aside from whether or not Edwin Drood was murdered, is: Who is Dick Datchery? Datchery is the enigmatic detective who enters the scene after the disappearance of Edwin Drood, clearly with suspicions of his own. Is he an entirely new character, or one of the characters we’ve already met, in disguise? Bazzard? Helena Landless? Even, Edwin Drood himself? Personally—and I’ve thought about this far too much—I am strongly with the Bazzardian camp. As a rather failed actor and playwright, Bazzard, theatrically-hearted clerk to the wonderful Mr. Grewgious, suddenly disappears in the novel, right about the time when Datchery comes to Cloisterham to investigate. I say he was instructed by Grewgious to find evidence of the crime.

Magwitch (Great Expectations)

Boze: “A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped and shivered and glared and growled.” From this unpromising beginning—Magwitch even threatens to have the young Pip’s “heart and liver out,” like a near relation of Mr Goroo—Dickens builds one of fiction’s most lovable and sympathetic baddies, employing a device which I will not spoil here. Only Dickens could make you so thoroughly invested in the fate of a man who forces Pip to steal pork pies and says aloud, to no one in particular, “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!” So do I, Abel. So do I.

Poster for Sir John Martin-Harvey in the stage production of The Only Way, based on A Tale of Two Cities

Sydney Carton (A Tale of Two Cities)

Rach: A dissolute, near-twin to Charles Darnay whose life has utterly gone in the wrong direction, consumed in work and wine, Sydney Carton is a broken barrister with a hopeless love for Lucie Manette—and an utter disdain for himself. So much so, that he loves her too much to want her to return his love. Always in the shadows, always underrecognized and underappreciated, always doing a good turn even when he’d rather not, Sydney is always the smartest—and most sarcastic—guy in the room. He continually broods, walks, works, thinks and overthinks; he has the heart of a Romantic but his true feelings he shows to few. His mysterious dissatisfaction with himself, beginning around the time of his father’s death which is only briefly alluded to in the text, is brought to an amazing, though quiet, circularity and fulfillment in his relationship with Mr. Lorry—one of the best relationships in Dickens. Sydney is the reason I became obsessed not only with this novel, but with the history of the French Revolution. It is a joke in my house that “everything relates to Sydney Carton,” and even after more than twenty years he remains my favorite character in literature.

Sam showing Pickwick a multitude of Dickensian characters. How many can you spot?