Over-handed

Charles Dickens, from Bleak House (1853).

Bleak House is full of these moments. The most fleetingly present characters get their chance in the spotlight.

If you teach the novel, I think it’s appropriate to demonstrate the toss and catch. A quarter works nicely.

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A comment on this post notes that G.K. Chesterton said something similar about the attention Dickens gives to minor characters. Call it anticipatory plagiarism: Chesterton had the idea before I did. This passage, which mentions characters in The Pickwick Papers and Our Mutual Friend , captures the idea. From Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906):

[I]f Dickens had written the Sherlock Holmes stories, every character in them would have been equally arresting and memorable. A Sherlock Holmes would have cooked the dinner for Sherlock Holmes; a Sherlock Holmes would have driven his cab. If Dickens brought in a man merely to carry a letter, he had time for a touch or two, and made him a giant. Dickens not only conquered the world, he conquered it with minor characters. Mr. John Smauker, the servant of Mr. Cyrus Bantam, though he merely passes across the stage, is almost as vivid to us as Mr. Samuel Weller, the servant of Mr. Samuel Pickwick. The young man with the lumpy forehead, who only says “Esker” to Mr. Podsnap’s foreign gentleman, is as good as Mr. Podsnap himself. They appear only for a fragment of time, but they belong to eternity. We have them only for an instant, but they have us for ever.

Also from Bleak House
At Peffer and Snagsby’s : Bucket’s Moleskine? : Dickens in the house : Five sentences : Gridley’s monologue : “It must be a strange state” : Jellyby closets : Learning to write : Living on credit : “London particular” : Reading don’t pay : “Town-talk”