Dickens exhausts–989 pages–and combusts. He begins with a consuming fog– the miasmatic chancery– and his characters are gradually consumed by the case or extricate themselves from it. Esther Summerson is Dickens’s great female narrator, but for medicine, Allan Woodcourt is the great physician who cares for the poor. “There were two classes of charitable people: one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.”