New words

[HarryT]

That's a very interesting analysis - thanks for posting it. I hadn't considered it in that way before, but I think you're absolutely right. It seems clear that Dickens didn't anticipate that his readers would have any difficulty in understanding his meaning, by analogy to other "-dom" words.

[gmw]

(You can tell my writing isn't going well, I'm finding other things to get obsessed with. )

I can't vouch for the veracity of the information on this link, but what it says is:

[...]Anybody who cites these based on the OED’s evidence risks being regarded as out of touch. Most of the entries haven’t been revised since they were compiled a century ago. Our etymological knowledge has improved greatly since then and has had a huge boost from the introduction of searchable digitised archives. I trawled the British Library’s archive of nineteenth-century newspapers to check how original these words really were. A lot weren’t.

Boredom, for example, which Dickens included in Bleak House in 1853, is known from the Theatrical Examiner of April 1841; he used casualty ward in Sketches by Boz in 1836 but it’s known from Jackson’s Oxford Journal dated January 1825; [...]

But he also adds:

[...]Other terms are certainly his to claim, including sawbones, messiness, whizz-bang, unpromisingly, spiflication and seediness. [...]

As these examples show, we must always be sceptical of claims about who invented a word. Deeper digging often demonstrates that others had got to them first. But nobody is going to be less attracted by Dickens through knowing that.

(Although given his assertion on how sceptical we must be about such claims, you are left wondering why he is so certain of the words listed in the above quote.)