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Dickens has often been praised for the extraordinary inwardness with which he renders the experience of criminal guilt - that of Fagin, for example, or Jonas Chuzzlewit. Given his admiration for the work of Thomas Hood, it seems probable that 'The Dream of Eugene Aram' ( 1 828) provided Dickens with a point of departure for the latter, since, like the poem, the relevant passages in the novel present a consuming monomania, and even recall some of its incidental details. On a purely superficial level, we have the common denominator of the woodland setting, and the clothing of the corpse in leaves:
It is also significant that Hood should transfuse the murderer's guilt through the circumambient air:
Dickens, as we can see, apocalyptically transfers the blood of Montague Tigg into the ruddy sunset, additionally inspired, perhaps, by a recollection of Doctor Faustus:
What had he left within the wood, that he sprang out of it as if it were a hell !
The body of a murdered man. In one thick solitary spot, it lay among the last year's leaves of oak and beech, just as it had fallen headlong down. Sopping and soaking in among...