Some years ago, I wrote a book on Dickens in relation to the idea of the Grotesque (listed below in the bibliography) – a concept, I believe, that can be considered as in close alignment with that of the Comic Gothic examined in these pages. They share in particular an essential hybridity, in which intrinsically contradictory generic modes fuse and interact. This is indicated by the obvious presence of apparent oxymo-ron in the case of the term ‘Comic Gothic’, and in that of ‘Grotesque’ by a body of theoretical writing which constantly points to hybridity as a defining feature of the tradition it examines. In my book I chose to single out for detailed consideration two major theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser, both of whom – albeit with somewhat different emphases – focus on the Gothic elements of the hybrid artistic compound they identify as the ‘Grotesque’ – thereby exemplifying the connection between the two concepts.

Dickens – unlike, say, Henry James – was not a writer to concern himself unduly with conceptual generalisation or elaborate commentary on his artistic method. It is thus of significance that the word ‘grotesque’ occurs with relative frequency in his writing, both in the fiction itself and in his writing about it. A locus classicus of this is provided in a letter of September 1860, when he describes to his friend John Forster how the fundamental idea of Great Expectations first occurred to him: ‘such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me’ (Dickens 1979, 310) where the context clearly suggests that ‘grotesque’ had value for him as a term for an artistic tendency and as a method of working.

Turning to Dickens's explicit relation to the Gothic tradition, I should like to reiterate an assertion I made in the entry on Dickens in The Encyclopedia of The Gothic, that Dickens in the 1830s ‘effected decisive and lasting change in the history of Gothic fiction’ (Hughes, Punter and Smith 2016, 176).