1 Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and The Cricket on the Hearth Heather Anne Tilley This essay is an exploration of the ways in which sentimentality is manifested through the visible, and through associative functions of the eye, in two of Dickens’s Christmas books of the 1840s. The term sentimentality is by no means homogenous, either in its practice in literature and the visual arts in the mid-nineteenth-century, or in its interpretation by modern critics and theorists. Sentimentality is often associated with the exaggerated emotional portrayal of pathetic scenes (particularly the deaths of children), designed to elicit emotional responses from the reader. 1 This essay however draws upon the definition of the sentimental in eighteenth-century moral philosophy with the aim to provide a more historicised account of its function in Dickens’s texts. I argue that behind the often hyperbolic emotional descriptions in A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth rests a concern with the self’s need to take social, ethical and moral care of others, and an interrogation of the role of literature and art in tutoring the reader’s emotional response. The 1840s mark a redefinition in Dickens’s visual practice, and the Christmas books (A Christmas Carol, 1843; The Chimes, 1845; The Battle of Life, 1846, The Cricket on the Hearth, 1846; and The Haunted Man, 1848) signal the importance of the visible in his writing between 1843-48, from the material appearance of the books, to the proliferation of visual details, verbs and images throughout the text, and the special care given to the illustrations. In the Christmas Books, the narrative demonstrates that looking is not just a function of the eye; it is also a culturally and socially constructed act. Vision is used to provoke moral or empathic responses in the reader through the use of pity (the text’s sentimental practice); and eyes, which proliferate in the writing, function as sites of sentimental expression (through the act of crying). 2 Thus the eye plays an important role in reinforcing Dickens’s sentimental practice. This relationship between vision and sentiment finds its origins in eighteenth-century moral philosophy, as Adam Smith’s figure of the “Impartial Spectator”, of central importance to the development of ideas around sympathy, is constructed mainly through the visual. Through a close reading of these two texts, this essay suggests that focusing on the function of vision within that philosophic discourse illuminates further connections between Victorian sentimentality Heather Anne Tilley, Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 4 (2007) www.19.bbk.ac.uk