Belinda ’s Birds: Flights of Realism in Edgeworth and Dickens

Abstract This essay takes the embodiment of the bird’s-eye view as an invitation to revisit its connections to narrative omniscience, on the one hand, and the first-person point of view, on the other. A comparison of the birds of Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) to those of Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Thomas Bewick, whose History of British Birds was a narrative resource for later writers, including Charles Dickens, produces an account of the relationship between the first and the third persons not yet described in narrative theory and indicates that the boundaries between sentimental and realist fiction are blurrier than has been supposed.