Drowning in early Dickens

Although he was by no means alone in his use of death by water, there were no other Victorian novelists who enjoyed drowning their characters quite as much as Dickens did. The relatively frequent use of drowning as a trope situated Dickens firmly within the metaphorical economy of nineteenth-century culture; many other novelists, poets, painters, journalists even, took ip the trope in different, through related, forms; throughout the century, drownings figure in the works of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Wordsworth, Wilkie Collins, Lord Byron, M.R. James, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Charles Kingsley, Algernon Swinburn, J. Meade Falkner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Braddon.