THE SECRET LIFE OF MINOR CHARACHERS IN MRS. DALLOWAY Irena Ksiezopolska I. Dickens, Woolf and character-mongering One of the distinctive features of Woolf’s texts is the phenomenon of the secondary characters who crowd into the narrative without so much as an excuse for their existence in the structure of the plot lines and come complete with numerous details of their appearance and private history. We may interpret this feature as an attempt to reflect the fullness of life, showing each moment to be an intersection of multi-layered movements of thoughts and visual impressions, streaming through the minds of chance passers by. However, there is something in Woolf’s technique that seems puzzling – especially in the light of her comments on the seemingly similar use of superfluous characters by Dickens. Dickens was to Woolf a somewhat menacing presence due to his special place in Victorian culture – “not so much a great writer as an intolerable institution” 1 , a perfect example of the masculine prose. Yet she did admire his “character-making power [that] is so prodigious” 2 . Woolf’s praise for this fecundity of Dickens is never quite unconditional, it always seems somewhat uneasy, mixed with distrust of what she describes as his method: With such power at his command Dickens made his books blaze up, not by tightening the plot or sharpening the wit, but by throwing another handful of people upon the fire. The interest flags and he creates Miss Mowcher, completely alive, equipped in every detail as if she were to play a great part in the story, whereas once the full stretch of road is passed by her help, she disappears; she is needed no longer. Hence a Dickens novel is apt to become a bunch of separate characters loosely held together, often by the most arbitrary conventions, who tend to fly asunder and split our attention into so many different parts that we drop the book in despair. 3 1 ‘Dickens by a Disciple’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vol. III (Hogarth Press, 1988), 25. 2 ‘Phases of Fiction’ in Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf, vol. II (Hogarth Press, 1966), 71. 3 ‘David Copperfield’, ibid., vol. I (Hogarth Press, 1966), 194.