It is ingenious and it helps to explain Mrs.Nickleby, the Pecksniff daughters, and many another.
Whether it is true or not (and it does not explain the faultiness of such pictures as Carker and his kind) there can be no doubt that this trick in Dickens of beginning with a salient impression and working outward to a fuller conception of character is part at least of the reason of his enormous hold upon his readers.

No man leads you into the mazes of his invention so easily and with such a persuasive hand.
The great novelists who were writing contemporarily with him--the Brontes, Mrs.Gaskell, George Eliot--it is impossible to deal with here, except to say that the last is indisputably, because of her inability to fuse completely art and ethics, inferior to Mrs.Gaskell or to either of the Bronte sisters.

Nor of the later Victorians who added fresh variety to the national style can the greatest, Meredith, be more than mentioned for the exquisiteness of his comic spirit and the brave gallery of English men and women he has given us in what is, perhaps, fundamentally the most English thing in fiction since Fielding wrote.
For our purpose Mr.Hardy, though he is a less brilliant artist, is more to the point.

His novels brought into England the contemporary pessimism of Schopenhaur and the Russians, and found a home for it among the English peasantry.

Convinced that in the upper classes character could be studied and portrayed only subjectively because of the artificiality of a society which prevented its outlet in action, he turned to the peasantry because with them conduct is the direct expression of the inner life.