Index entries in John Carey’s The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’ Imagination, 1973:

babies, bottled, 82
begging-letters, 67
beheading, 21
caged birds, 44, 46, 116-19
cannibalism, 22-4, 175
cleanliness, excessive, 36-7
climbing boys, 72
coffins, walking, 80-1
combustible persons, 14, 165
dolls’ houses, 34
dust heaps, 109-11
fire, seeing pictures in, 16
furniture, live, 102-3
grindstones, 129
home-smashing, 17
junk, enchantment of, 49-50
land-ships, 43-6, 49-9
legs, humour of, 61-2, 92-3
mirrored episodes, 125-6
old clothes, 89-91
pokers, red-hot, 26, 85
‘ruffian class,’ the, 38-9
scissored women, 163-4
seedsman’s shops, 45-6, 48
silent laughter, 98-100, 165
snuff, composed of dead bodies, 80
talking birds, 100-1
umbrellas, 128-9
virtuous violence, 28-9
waxworks, 82, 84
wooden legs, 91-3, 103
zoo, feeding time at, 68-9

“It does not matter that Dickens’s world is not lifelike,” wrote Lord David Cecil. “It is alive.”