Dickens novels as verse

My figurative title, Dickens Novels as Verse, points to the likeness between the incidental patterning in Dickens novels and meter, rhyme, and alliteration---elements standard to formal lyric verse that give a poem extra coherence and identity. In traditional verse, meter, rhyme and alliteration provide layers of coherence that are separate from, are purely extra to, whatever it is the poem causes readers to think about. Except in crudely formal poems (for instance, Masefield's "Sea-Fever," a poem overwhelmed by the exaggerated regularity of its rhythm), readers glide over them, just as they glide over most of the incidental material in Dickens novels. At the same time, however, these extra layers make the poem's substance feel truer and more just because their effect is to make the overall experience---literally---more coherent. I argue that the incidental patterning in Dickens novels generates a similar homogenizing effect, though one diffused over a great deal more space and time. We readily accede to the notion that a great little poem can contain in "one little room, an everywhere." I account for why the inverse is true of Dickens novels: why they obviously sprawl and, at the same time and without contradiction, feel bounded and tight.