James Wood

So it's a novel that starting in London can take in the whole entitled country and then in concentric circles of entitlement take in the whole world.

In that sense, we might think of the book, though it's nothing like, say, Bleak House.

But we might think of it as having in its compressed way something of the ambition of, say, Dickens' Bleak House that can muse and brood over an enormous gallery of people all gathered together in London.

This is much more miniature, but it has similar ambitions.

And it also has, interestingly, sort of minor flat characters that aren't exactly...

Well, they are somewhat Dickensian.

We might say that the difference being that Dickens repeats these characters so that the sort of leitmotif thing that we associate with Dickens' characters.

can come back again and again and again and precisely repeat, whereas Woolf tends to use a flat character in a satirical portrait only once.

But they're quite Dickensian.

Let me give you some examples of these flattish characters.

Some of whom we only glimpse once, some of whom, like Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, these two famous society doctors, we glimpse more often.

So here is one character who we only hear of in this one occasion, Mr. Bowley, who had rooms in the Albany and was sealed with wax over the deeper sources of life.

The aforementioned Dr. Holmes, who treats the morbidly depressed Septimus Warren Smith, a victim of the First World War.

Dr. Holmes's approach essentially is eat more porridge.

I think he also says to Septimus Warren Smith, you're in a bit of a funk, aren't you?

We encounter Hugh Whitbread, a friend of the Dalloways.

He's in their social circle.

He has some sort of silly job as a courtier, sort of works for the king, and is one of those people who are expert at writing letters to the Times and sort of

greasing the imperial machine.

Or as Wolfe puts it, he had been afloat on the cream of English society for 55 years.