“Accidents will happen”: Dickens’s Comical Mishaps

Abstract:This article critically unpacks the complex narrative potential that mishaps fulfil in Dickens’s fiction. It parses the way comedy works in his depiction of the various accidents of daily life and explores how their shifting narrative functions influentially shaped the representation of personal misfortune and social ethics at a time that saw competing interpretative frameworks of why accidents happen. Situating Dickens’s fictional mishaps amidst the changing concepts of the accidental in the nineteenth century, I trace how he creates comedy based on pantomimic transformations in The Pickwick Papers, and how this mode continues to operate in his writing. Martin Chuzzlewit then marks a turning-point in prefiguring sensational representations of seeming household accidents. In Dickens’s later novels, the comedy of accidents shifts towards a parodic engagement with specific – individual and institutional – interpretations. Thus, in Little Dorrit, accidents and their misinterpretations comically complicate competing ideas of probability, misfortune, and poetic justice.