1. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 292. See also Ermarth’s idea of omniscience as “collective consciousness” in Realism and Consensus in the English Novel.

2. Lane Cooper, ed., The Rhetoric of Aristotle (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1960), pp. 212–13.

3. Robert Caserio, Plot, Story, and the Novel (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 57.

4. Jarndyce here resembles Tulkinghorn, whose “calling is the acquisition of secrets, and the holding possession of such power as they give him” (567).

5. On narrative as action, see A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes, “The Cognitive Dimension of Narrative Discourse,” New Literary History 7 (1976): 433–47.

6. P. J. M. Scott, Reality and Comic Confidence in the Novels of Charles Dickens (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 71.

7. Jonathan Arac distinguishes surprises, by definition, from plot: “[S]uch a shock…has only symbolic bearing on the action because it surprises us. Inevitability is the characteristic of plot in the sense that I am using the term. The plot is the ground from which the book’s events spring and in which their roots can be traced”: Commissioned Spirits, p. 164.

8. M. M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 308.

9. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. ix.

10. Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 17, 19: “a death by displacement—by which I am suggesting a death undergone by proxy so that it can be overseen by a surviving protagonist—that serves to defray the psychic expenditure of an equivalent fatality in the onlooking consciousness”; “death from the security of aesthetic distance.”

11. G. K. Chesterton, “The Pickwick Papers,” in George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane, Jr., eds., The Dickens Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 121.

12. See Rosemary Mundhenk, “The Education of the Reader in Our Mutual Friend,” Nineteenth Century Fiction 34 (1979): 48.

13. U.C. Knoepflmacher, Laughter and Despair (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 140 and pp. 163–64.

14. Frances X. Shea, “No Change of Intention in Our Mutual Friend,” Dickensian 63 (1967): 37–40; Robert Newsom, “ ‘To Scatter Dust’: Fancy and Authenticity in Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 39–60.

15. Grahame Smith, Dickens, Money, and Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968) p. 182.