Charles Dickens has created a wide variety of heroines are as various as the different novels in which they are depicted. In his novels, women are depicted as either beautiful and empty or significant and effective, or as self-sacrificing metaphors. Sometimes one feels that in his fiction the female characters contribute to the growth of the male protagonists only to be overshadowed by them. There is this strange nexus between void and womanhood, which is enacted in Dickens' fiction. In a sense, Dickens seems to be celebrating womanhood by confining his heroines within the labyrinthine passages of his novels. The present paper is an attempt to study the Dickensian heroine as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.

In the history of the English novel, the nineteenth century was a golden age. This was mainly due to three reasons. The first is that essentially being a form of literary art of the middle-classes, it was but natural for the novel to flourish in the same degree as the middle classes rose in power and importance. The second reason is that there was a slow, yet very perceptible and steady increase of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries. The third reason is perhaps the most important: the novel was considered to be the vehicle best equipped to present a picture of life lived in any society against a stable background of social and moral values, by people who were as real as in real life. This contemporaneity of characters is very much a part of Dickens' art of characterization. This was also the kind of picture of life that the middle-class reader wanted to read about. As the critic Northrop Frye opines, the novel, like the medieval `fabliau', is what he calls a "low mimetic" literary form (Daiches, 1969, p. 1049). The reason for the form of the novel finding popular favor with the Victorian reader is explained by him thus:

The purely escapist impulse to read about a high aristocratic world of ideal gallantry and beauty is as lacking in the typical Victorian novel-reader as the desire to see the fundamental problems of human experience projected imaginatively and symbolically through the presentation of great figures acting out their destiny on the grand scale. The Victorian novel-reader did want to be entertained, and in a sense he wanted to escape. But he wanted to be entertained with a minimum of literary convention, a minimum "esthetic distance" (Daiches, 1969, p. 1049).

Charles Dickens, kaleidoscope, Aristocratic world, Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens Novels, Emotional potentialities, Preconceptions, Biography spilling, Blacking factory, Eccentric independence, Social and masculine privileges, Domestic lives, Investment decisions, Social and economic consequences, Economic force.