Sue’s Reviews > The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination > Status Update

Besides effigies and pictures and clothes, other creatures which inhabit this hinterland between life and non-life are people made up from inanimate bits and pieces-wooden legs, wigs, artificial hands and so forth.

The effigy, the picture, the thing with human lineaments which watches, paralysed and dumb-this supplies a major imaginative level in Dickens’ novels which interacts with the human beings just as importantly as the human beings react to each other.

From ch 4, Corpses and Effigies: “Dickens’ dead figures who subject the living to their alarmed and alarming gaze are made of wood..stone..metal..painted canvas as well as wax. The mingled terror and hilarity they cause harks back to Dickens’ toddler days. His nursery contained a monstrous collection of effigies, who pretended to be dead with alarming ill-success” Details of Dickens emotional scars follow.