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Dickens's endings, once dismissed as weakest parts of his novels, have more recently come under serious and respectful consideration. Alexander Welsh, G. W. Kennedy, John Kucich, and Alistair Duckworth,1 among others, have analyzed Dickens's endings in terms of some implications of Frank Kermode's study The Sense of an Ending, which describes narrative endings as an attempt to mediate between a modern historicism which posits an infinite expanse of time and an eschatological sense of teleology. Whereas Dickens's endings had formerly been accounted more or less successful devices for stemming a theoretically infinite flux of events, these more recent studies have treated each particular ending as authoritative final perspective, terminus ad quern, that determines significance of each element,2 even if it operates by deconstructing, or partially deconstructing, thematic unity novel has seemed to promise.3 The endings of Dickens's novels are characteristically marked, as Welsh and Kennedy have noted,4 by a passage from a durative sense of time to an apocalyptic sense which confirms final order of society by arresting its development, for better or worse. But Dickens's sense of formal closure changes and deepens in his later work. Kennedy has observed that the methods Dickens used to conclude his novels demonstrate a fairly steady progression toward variety and subtlety through course of his artistic career.5 This essay will argue more explicitly that endings of Dickens's early novels, however carefully and ingeniously prepared, are essentially contrivances which novels do not so much display as accommodate; that Dickens's terminal devices assume a specifically teleological dimension only in his later work, and that this dimension is one of hallmarks of later novels; and that endings of Dickens's final novels, which represent a further formal development, are flexible enough to incorporate binary and irreconcilable endings his fictional events seem to predicate. The distinction between endings which are displayed and those which are merely accommodated is suggested by Kenneth Burke's distinction between
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