As Pip arrives in London at the beginning of the "second stage" of his "expectations," he describes his first impressions of Mr. Jaggers's office in strikingly embodied terms. Although the room is empty, Pip sees traces or impressions of bodies everywhere: he notes the skylight "eccentrically patched like a broken head," the nearby houses "looking as if they had twisted themselves to peep down at me through it," the casts on the shelf "of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy about the nose," and even the wall opposite Jaggers's chair as "being greasy with shoulders".
The saturation of physicalized detail in this passage is fascinating: despite being in an empty room, Pip feels himself immersed in the comings and goings of Jaggers's office, and witness to the many people who pass through the space or are affected by its workings. Such a moment palpably demonstrates a point which has often been remarked upon by critics: for Dickens, bodies and traces of bodies and even things which look like bodies seem to be central to the way that he imagines and conjures a scene in his writing.
Peter Capuano's fascinating new book, Dickens's Idiomatic Imagination, keeps physical bodies in sight but attends instead to their presence within Dickens's idiomatic language. Capuano's study focuses specifically upon bodily idioms, of which there are hundreds of examples within Dickens's work, which are beautifully represented in a word cloud on the book's front cover.
While the wealth of examples is an important part of Capuano's argument, however, the central tenet of his book is a truly remarkable discovery: for each novel studied Capuano selects a single bodily idiom that Dickens uses only in that particular novel, and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This fascinating observation makes an extremely persuasive case for each idiom's centrality to the structure and theme of the novel within which it is used. — Emma Curry