John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the ...
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Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies; and the spread of language and ideas. Communicative attempts such as these permeate Dombey, the novel in which characters struggle to hear and through which Dickens struggles to be heard. Dombey famously and ambiguously invokes the arrival of the railway at the same time as Dickens's serialized form faces competition from new forms of railway reading, shilling novels selling for the same price as a single Dombey installment. Amidst this changing scene and under the influence of ideas Charles Babbage discussed in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Dickens examines the complications involved in trafficking bodies, transferring capital, and establishing contact.Less
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies; and the spread of language and ideas. Communicative attempts such as these permeate Dombey, the novel in which characters struggle to hear and through which Dickens struggles to be heard. Dombey famously and ambiguously invokes the arrival of the railway at the same time as Dickens's serialized form faces competition from new forms of railway reading, shilling novels selling for the same price as a single Dombey installment. Amidst this changing scene and under the influence of ideas Charles Babbage discussed in his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, Dickens examines the complications involved in trafficking bodies, transferring capital, and establishing contact.
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks ...
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This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.Less
This book considers the extent to which Dickens and his work reflects the vibrant novelty of the middle third of the 19th century, an age in which the modern world was shaped and determined. It looks at the culture from which Dickens sprang — a mechanized and increasingly urbanized culture — and it sees his rootlessness and restlessness as symptomatic of what was essentially new: the period's political and technological enterprise; its urbanization; its new definitions of social class and social mobility; and, finally, its dynamic sense of distinction from the preceding age. Although his fiction was rooted in traditions established and evolved in the 18th century, Dickens was uniquely equipped to remould the English novel into a new and flexible fictional form, as a direct response to the social, urban, and political challenges of his time.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Since the manifest design of a Charles Dickens novel is directed at redemption and restoration, the heroine is most often and most overtly the agent of such. In accordance with a simple compulsion or ...
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Since the manifest design of a Charles Dickens novel is directed at redemption and restoration, the heroine is most often and most overtly the agent of such. In accordance with a simple compulsion or narrative law, any single character, if permitted to interact for a while with the rest of the cast, will tend to attach itself to another character. In Dombey and Son, the plot is structured towards the redemption and vindication as well. Facile scapegoating is firmly placed by its provenance but it does mimic that simplifying tendency of the narrative movement itself. If Dombey and Son is about pride, David Copperfield is about love and its possible variations. Partnerships are at the centre of Dickens's design, but at its base is that loneliness and exclusion from one's own kind to which almost anything seems preferable. Our Mutual Friend is perhaps the most redemption-directed of all Dickens's novels.Less
Since the manifest design of a Charles Dickens novel is directed at redemption and restoration, the heroine is most often and most overtly the agent of such. In accordance with a simple compulsion or narrative law, any single character, if permitted to interact for a while with the rest of the cast, will tend to attach itself to another character. In Dombey and Son, the plot is structured towards the redemption and vindication as well. Facile scapegoating is firmly placed by its provenance but it does mimic that simplifying tendency of the narrative movement itself. If Dombey and Son is about pride, David Copperfield is about love and its possible variations. Partnerships are at the centre of Dickens's design, but at its base is that loneliness and exclusion from one's own kind to which almost anything seems preferable. Our Mutual Friend is perhaps the most redemption-directed of all Dickens's novels.
Clare Pettitt
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199253203
- eISBN:
- 9780191719172
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199253203.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Both Charles Dickens and William Thackeray supported Sir Henry Cole's aim to publicise the benefits to the consumer of free international trade through the Great Exhibition of 1851 held in London, ...
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Both Charles Dickens and William Thackeray supported Sir Henry Cole's aim to publicise the benefits to the consumer of free international trade through the Great Exhibition of 1851 held in London, England. For the writer or inventor in Victorian England, private property was necessarily staked on an open marketplace, and retaining a ‘free power of control’ could prove hazardous in such a competitive and unregulated environment. The extent to which display both underwrote and threatened the value of intellectual property became very clear at the Exhibition, revealing how closely the debates about patents and copyright mirrored one another in their anxieties about privacy and utility. This chapter discusses two of Dickens's most complex works, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, showing the ways in which the displacements of authorship in these texts can only be properly understood in the context of the debates about the professionalisation of authorship.Less
Both Charles Dickens and William Thackeray supported Sir Henry Cole's aim to publicise the benefits to the consumer of free international trade through the Great Exhibition of 1851 held in London, England. For the writer or inventor in Victorian England, private property was necessarily staked on an open marketplace, and retaining a ‘free power of control’ could prove hazardous in such a competitive and unregulated environment. The extent to which display both underwrote and threatened the value of intellectual property became very clear at the Exhibition, revealing how closely the debates about patents and copyright mirrored one another in their anxieties about privacy and utility. This chapter discusses two of Dickens's most complex works, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, showing the ways in which the displacements of authorship in these texts can only be properly understood in the context of the debates about the professionalisation of authorship.
Kathryn M. Grossman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199642953
- eISBN:
- 9780191739231
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199642953.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, ...
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Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, the text explores the question of violence in the service of revolutionary ideals, thereby completing Hugo’s lifelong reflections on the sublime and the grotesque. Three generations fight for their divergent visions of the nation’s past, present, and future in the exotic, unchartered terrain of north-west France. But Hugo’s play on space and time contains not just a political but also a personal element. The poet’s intertextual dialogue with his celebrated British counterparts now includes his Victorian contemporary, Charles Dickens, as well. The novel’s reply to A Tale of Two Cities provides insights into Hugo’s singular conception of the role of poetry in shaping his narrative and the future French republic alikeLess
Chapter 4 turns to Hugo’s Quatrevingt-Treize (1874), a meditation on the French Revolution composed in the wake of the bloody Paris Commune. Set in both Paris and Brittany during the Reign of Terror, the text explores the question of violence in the service of revolutionary ideals, thereby completing Hugo’s lifelong reflections on the sublime and the grotesque. Three generations fight for their divergent visions of the nation’s past, present, and future in the exotic, unchartered terrain of north-west France. But Hugo’s play on space and time contains not just a political but also a personal element. The poet’s intertextual dialogue with his celebrated British counterparts now includes his Victorian contemporary, Charles Dickens, as well. The novel’s reply to A Tale of Two Cities provides insights into Hugo’s singular conception of the role of poetry in shaping his narrative and the future French republic alike
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
One subsequently highly influential commentator on 19th-century England, Friedrich Engels, found the London of the 1840s, Dickens's London, at once an exhilarating and a profoundly disturbing place. ...
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One subsequently highly influential commentator on 19th-century England, Friedrich Engels, found the London of the 1840s, Dickens's London, at once an exhilarating and a profoundly disturbing place. London first seen is a marvel; London more closely observed is a monster. For Engels London represents all that was wrong with modern civilization. It had fatally damaged human relationships by alienating citizen from citizen and by rendering citizen and stranger unhappily equal. What 19th-century London represented to him was the decay of an old hierarchical order, an order in which men and women knew their social and geographical place. The old hierarchical pattern had been replaced by a disordered world of self-seeking. For Engels the phenomenon of alienation was a symptom of the disease of modern capitalism. That Dickens would not have readily assented to Engels's diagnosis need scarcely be stressed. The ‘social war of each against all’ which Engels claimed had already been declared on the streets of London is not fought out, even by proxy, in the pages of Dickens's fiction. If Dickens readily recognized that the nature and composition of the ubiquitous crowd was the key to the proper understanding of modern urban life, he consistently declined to see that crowd as an anonymous mass.Less
One subsequently highly influential commentator on 19th-century England, Friedrich Engels, found the London of the 1840s, Dickens's London, at once an exhilarating and a profoundly disturbing place. London first seen is a marvel; London more closely observed is a monster. For Engels London represents all that was wrong with modern civilization. It had fatally damaged human relationships by alienating citizen from citizen and by rendering citizen and stranger unhappily equal. What 19th-century London represented to him was the decay of an old hierarchical order, an order in which men and women knew their social and geographical place. The old hierarchical pattern had been replaced by a disordered world of self-seeking. For Engels the phenomenon of alienation was a symptom of the disease of modern capitalism. That Dickens would not have readily assented to Engels's diagnosis need scarcely be stressed. The ‘social war of each against all’ which Engels claimed had already been declared on the streets of London is not fought out, even by proxy, in the pages of Dickens's fiction. If Dickens readily recognized that the nature and composition of the ubiquitous crowd was the key to the proper understanding of modern urban life, he consistently declined to see that crowd as an anonymous mass.
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Dickens came to America as a celebrity and he showed himself to be supremely happy in being celebrated as such. Yet Dickens was always somewhat ill at ease in America and with American institutions. ...
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Dickens came to America as a celebrity and he showed himself to be supremely happy in being celebrated as such. Yet Dickens was always somewhat ill at ease in America and with American institutions. The young, acutely self-conscious, radical Dickens of 1842 wanted to find a magnification of his own political and social prejudices in the pushy, classless young republic. After his adulatory but polite reception in Boston, he began to find America a noisy, assertive, non-deferential, and un-English place, one which disconcerted him in ways which he did not expect. As Steven Marcus has noticed, Dickens believed that he saw a ‘new kind of social authority’ in the United States which had a tendency to ‘convert the private self into public property and into something wholly externalized’ — an externalization accompanied by reckless, aggressive self-inflation. He was also prone to judge America and Americans, both for good and ill, by imported, fastidiously insular, and, to some degree, snobbish standards.Less
Dickens came to America as a celebrity and he showed himself to be supremely happy in being celebrated as such. Yet Dickens was always somewhat ill at ease in America and with American institutions. The young, acutely self-conscious, radical Dickens of 1842 wanted to find a magnification of his own political and social prejudices in the pushy, classless young republic. After his adulatory but polite reception in Boston, he began to find America a noisy, assertive, non-deferential, and un-English place, one which disconcerted him in ways which he did not expect. As Steven Marcus has noticed, Dickens believed that he saw a ‘new kind of social authority’ in the United States which had a tendency to ‘convert the private self into public property and into something wholly externalized’ — an externalization accompanied by reckless, aggressive self-inflation. He was also prone to judge America and Americans, both for good and ill, by imported, fastidiously insular, and, to some degree, snobbish standards.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and ...
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This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?Less
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This book's approach to the representations close listeners left of their soundscapes draws upon literary and scientific works to recapture the sense of aural discovery figures such as Babbage, Helmholtz, Freud, Bell, and Edison shared with the likes of Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Stoker, and Conrad. The book chronicles the shift from Romantic to modern configurations of sound and voice, with an ear for the intersections of 19th-century technology, psychology, and acoustics. The difficult questions this book raises about sound remain with us: who decides who gets heard and what gets silenced? Who determines what is music and what is merely noise? What roles do public reading and audio recording play in the development of an author's distinctive voice? What is at stake in close listening, and what would we hear if we practiced it?
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible ...
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This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.Less
This book examines the notion that the realist novel reinforces existing social structures through its techniques of representation. It depicts the 19th-century literary scapegoat — the ostensible victim of the expulsive pressure of plot — as begetter of an alternative vision, questioning the values apparently upheld by the novel as a whole. Novels, like communities, need scapegoats to rid them of their unexpressed anxieties. This has placed the realist novel under suspicion of collaborating with established authority, by reproducing the very structures it often seeks to criticise. This book investigates this charge through close and illuminating readings of five realist novels of the 19th century: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. The book looks at these works in relation to one another, to their literary and social contexts, and to modern critical thinking. Sceptical of unexamined abstractions, but appreciative of the acumen of much recent criticism, this book places the realist novel at the centre of current debates, while respecting the power of literature to anticipate the insights of its critics.
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Dickens struck most of his first readers as someone which blazed on to the early-Victorian literary firmament like a meteor. The ambitious but still tentative writer who signed himself with the ...
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Dickens struck most of his first readers as someone which blazed on to the early-Victorian literary firmament like a meteor. The ambitious but still tentative writer who signed himself with the pseudonym ‘Boz’ published his first prose ‘sketch’ in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. Boz's reputation as a comic observer of London life and London whims was firmly established during the two following years with a stream of further ‘sketches’ published in various magazines, journals, and newspapers. In March 1836, two volumes of the stories he had collected together as Sketches by ‘Boz’ Illustrative of every-day life and every-day people, were released. The very blaze of the talent of the young Boz/Dickens was evidently compelling to his new readers who witnessed the writer of the Sketches triumphantly emerging as the author of the phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers. The reputation of Pickwick Papers was to prove long-lasting and memories of the Pickwick phenomenon in the late-1830s were to remain embedded in the popular imagination, both in fact and fiction.Less
Dickens struck most of his first readers as someone which blazed on to the early-Victorian literary firmament like a meteor. The ambitious but still tentative writer who signed himself with the pseudonym ‘Boz’ published his first prose ‘sketch’ in the Monthly Magazine in December 1833. Boz's reputation as a comic observer of London life and London whims was firmly established during the two following years with a stream of further ‘sketches’ published in various magazines, journals, and newspapers. In March 1836, two volumes of the stories he had collected together as Sketches by ‘Boz’ Illustrative of every-day life and every-day people, were released. The very blaze of the talent of the young Boz/Dickens was evidently compelling to his new readers who witnessed the writer of the Sketches triumphantly emerging as the author of the phenomenally successful Pickwick Papers. The reputation of Pickwick Papers was to prove long-lasting and memories of the Pickwick phenomenon in the late-1830s were to remain embedded in the popular imagination, both in fact and fiction.
Andrew Sanders
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198183549
- eISBN:
- 9780191674068
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198183549.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Dickens's response to the historic past was, for the most part, antipathetic. At their best, his retrospects suggest a large degree of ambiguity; at their worst they indicate a profound and restless ...
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Dickens's response to the historic past was, for the most part, antipathetic. At their best, his retrospects suggest a large degree of ambiguity; at their worst they indicate a profound and restless intolerance. But, contrary to much received opinion, he was neither nonchalant about history nor was his response to the manner and mores of the past exclusively that of ‘amused contempt’. His reaction to the culture, society, and politics of the late 18th century, that is, to the world of his relatively humble grandparents and of his yet obscurer great grandparents was, however, sharper and more defined than his responses to earlier periods. As the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities suggests, it was also, as were many of his other intellectual responses, a distinctively ambiguous reaction.Less
Dickens's response to the historic past was, for the most part, antipathetic. At their best, his retrospects suggest a large degree of ambiguity; at their worst they indicate a profound and restless intolerance. But, contrary to much received opinion, he was neither nonchalant about history nor was his response to the manner and mores of the past exclusively that of ‘amused contempt’. His reaction to the culture, society, and politics of the late 18th century, that is, to the world of his relatively humble grandparents and of his yet obscurer great grandparents was, however, sharper and more defined than his responses to earlier periods. As the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities suggests, it was also, as were many of his other intellectual responses, a distinctively ambiguous reaction.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198184614
- eISBN:
- 9780191714214
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184614.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's ...
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This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's writing and, in so doing, to pinpoint some of the contradictions that are endemic in the current state of understanding of his art. This book locates the rationale for Dickens's ‘ostension’ in his populism and his belief that ‘dramatic’ forms of entertainment best serve the purposes of cultural inclusivity. It is structured around melodramatic models of villainy that are passionally defined. This typology is a heuristic device rather than a rigid system of categorisation. Much Dickens criticism still seems to belong to either the post-structuralist or the mimetic school — one tending to stress the self-reflexive fictionality of Dickens's texts, and the other tending to treat the novels as representations of social and/or psychological realities.Less
This chapter introduces the book's purpose and scope to the reader. The author aims to illuminate the crucial symbiosis that exists between the ‘deviant’ and the ‘theatrical’ aspects of Dickens's writing and, in so doing, to pinpoint some of the contradictions that are endemic in the current state of understanding of his art. This book locates the rationale for Dickens's ‘ostension’ in his populism and his belief that ‘dramatic’ forms of entertainment best serve the purposes of cultural inclusivity. It is structured around melodramatic models of villainy that are passionally defined. This typology is a heuristic device rather than a rigid system of categorisation. Much Dickens criticism still seems to belong to either the post-structuralist or the mimetic school — one tending to stress the self-reflexive fictionality of Dickens's texts, and the other tending to treat the novels as representations of social and/or psychological realities.
Holly Furneaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199566099
- eISBN:
- 9780191721915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566099.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Dickens supplements his attention to bachelor parenting with a commitment to counter-marital plotting, articulating male resistance to marriage through diverse modes, ranging from the comic to the ...
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Dickens supplements his attention to bachelor parenting with a commitment to counter-marital plotting, articulating male resistance to marriage through diverse modes, ranging from the comic to the Gothic. While Dickens has seemed the exemplar of the bourgeois Victorian novelist using the wedlock tradition as a device for social reward and closure, the security of such plots is undermined by a wealth of counter-traditional narratives, in which marital closure is strenuously avoided. Important work has examined resistance to marital plotting from within in Dickens's fiction, noting the near ubiquity of marital disharmony. This project turns from discontent to indisposition to register Dickens's explicit articulations and plotting of marital aversion. Taking the presentation of the congenital and celebrated bachelor Mr Lorry in the weekly instalments and monthly parts of A Tale of Two Citiesas an opening case study, this chapter proposes that Dickens's first readers read differently for the plot. It teases out the queer possibilities of the serial form in which linear, teleological reading is structurally discouraged and closure is only ever a temporary cessation. By examining Dickens's fiction through the approaches recommended by book history — attentive to the conditions of publication and the varied experiences of readers — it becomes apparent that marriage and reproduction, even when present in Dickensian denouement, were not usually experienced as the author's final word.Less
Dickens supplements his attention to bachelor parenting with a commitment to counter-marital plotting, articulating male resistance to marriage through diverse modes, ranging from the comic to the Gothic. While Dickens has seemed the exemplar of the bourgeois Victorian novelist using the wedlock tradition as a device for social reward and closure, the security of such plots is undermined by a wealth of counter-traditional narratives, in which marital closure is strenuously avoided. Important work has examined resistance to marital plotting from within in Dickens's fiction, noting the near ubiquity of marital disharmony. This project turns from discontent to indisposition to register Dickens's explicit articulations and plotting of marital aversion. Taking the presentation of the congenital and celebrated bachelor Mr Lorry in the weekly instalments and monthly parts of A Tale of Two Citiesas an opening case study, this chapter proposes that Dickens's first readers read differently for the plot. It teases out the queer possibilities of the serial form in which linear, teleological reading is structurally discouraged and closure is only ever a temporary cessation. By examining Dickens's fiction through the approaches recommended by book history — attentive to the conditions of publication and the varied experiences of readers — it becomes apparent that marriage and reproduction, even when present in Dickensian denouement, were not usually experienced as the author's final word.
Juliet John
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780198184614
- eISBN:
- 9780191714214
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184614.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter discusses Dickens, acting, and ambivalence in relation to periodical passions. Dickens's thoughts on villainy are in no way simplistically schematic, or even consistent. Throughout his ...
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This chapter discusses Dickens, acting, and ambivalence in relation to periodical passions. Dickens's thoughts on villainy are in no way simplistically schematic, or even consistent. Throughout his journalistic commentary on contemporary criminals, his writings on the theatre, and his novels, the dialectic between passionate and passionless villainy anchors Dickens's perceptions of deviance. This chapter juxtaposes the observation made in Dickens's journals on the criminals of the day with his commentary on the contemporary stage and its villains in order to explore the anxieties shadowing Dickens's ideal vision of the melodramatic mode. Dickens's anxieties about theatricality in its various modes are explicitly voiced in his journalism. In his novels, ideologies are often implicitly dramatised. To Dickens, social performance could violate the principles of transparency and communality that melodramatic models of identity uphold, while stage performance provided him with his most rewarding experiences of the melodramatic mode.Less
This chapter discusses Dickens, acting, and ambivalence in relation to periodical passions. Dickens's thoughts on villainy are in no way simplistically schematic, or even consistent. Throughout his journalistic commentary on contemporary criminals, his writings on the theatre, and his novels, the dialectic between passionate and passionless villainy anchors Dickens's perceptions of deviance. This chapter juxtaposes the observation made in Dickens's journals on the criminals of the day with his commentary on the contemporary stage and its villains in order to explore the anxieties shadowing Dickens's ideal vision of the melodramatic mode. Dickens's anxieties about theatricality in its various modes are explicitly voiced in his journalism. In his novels, ideologies are often implicitly dramatised. To Dickens, social performance could violate the principles of transparency and communality that melodramatic models of identity uphold, while stage performance provided him with his most rewarding experiences of the melodramatic mode.
Helen Small
- Published in print:
- 1998
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198184911
- eISBN:
- 9780191674396
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198184911.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology ...
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For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology rather than psychology, the love-mad woman provided a means of asking what constituted ‘real’ pain. Such women had always raised the question of ‘truth’. Because they have suffered directly by men's falsehood or, indirectly, by the world's inability to guarantee their happiness, they prompt doubt about what can be assured in life. Couching their stories in hyperbole, they nevertheless resist the equation of excess with lying. Although they convey other stories within nineteenth-century fiction — and, in the process, come to mean both more and less than their own desolation — they still command pathos in themselves, even in the unsentimental world of the 1860s.Less
For Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, writing at a time when powerful sectors of the medical profession were increasingly insisting that knowledge of human life would be grounded in physiology rather than psychology, the love-mad woman provided a means of asking what constituted ‘real’ pain. Such women had always raised the question of ‘truth’. Because they have suffered directly by men's falsehood or, indirectly, by the world's inability to guarantee their happiness, they prompt doubt about what can be assured in life. Couching their stories in hyperbole, they nevertheless resist the equation of excess with lying. Although they convey other stories within nineteenth-century fiction — and, in the process, come to mean both more and less than their own desolation — they still command pathos in themselves, even in the unsentimental world of the 1860s.
Holly Furneaux
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199566099
- eISBN:
- 9780191721915
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199566099.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main ...
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This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main objective of the book, which argues that Dickens's early sympathy with Pratt and Smith was to develop into a career long dedication to the positive representation of same-sex desire and other non-heterosexual life choices. The book contributes to the ongoing revision of conceptions about Dickens and his age (neither so prudish or punitive as we once imagined), arguing that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and forms of family founded on neither marriage nor blood. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.Less
This introductory chapter begins with a description of the case of James Pratt and John Smith, who were convicted under a sodomy law only fully repealed in England in 1967. It then outlines main objective of the book, which argues that Dickens's early sympathy with Pratt and Smith was to develop into a career long dedication to the positive representation of same-sex desire and other non-heterosexual life choices. The book contributes to the ongoing revision of conceptions about Dickens and his age (neither so prudish or punitive as we once imagined), arguing that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and forms of family founded on neither marriage nor blood. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.
William Oddie
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199582013
- eISBN:
- 9780191702303
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199582013.003.0008
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Literature
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1904–6. Shortly after The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published in March 1904, Chesterton produced what, though it is one of his least ...
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This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1904–6. Shortly after The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published in March 1904, Chesterton produced what, though it is one of his least appreciated books, is in many ways one of his most characteristic: G. F. Watts, which appeared in the autumn. The book functions on two almost (but not quite) distinct levels. There is the level of pure art criticism, which reveals a considerable knowledge of other Victorian painters — Burne-Jones, Millais, Rossetti, and Whistler — and an ability to make the appropriate comparisons and contrasts between them. There is also the level on which a book about Watts, in Chesterton's hands, was bound to become an appropriate occasion for wider reflections on the culture wars of the Victorian age and of the post-Victorian world to which the book is directly addressed. The chapter also considers his other works: Heretics, Charles Dickens, and The Ball and the Cross.Less
This chapter focuses on Chesterton's life and works from 1904–6. Shortly after The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published in March 1904, Chesterton produced what, though it is one of his least appreciated books, is in many ways one of his most characteristic: G. F. Watts, which appeared in the autumn. The book functions on two almost (but not quite) distinct levels. There is the level of pure art criticism, which reveals a considerable knowledge of other Victorian painters — Burne-Jones, Millais, Rossetti, and Whistler — and an ability to make the appropriate comparisons and contrasts between them. There is also the level on which a book about Watts, in Chesterton's hands, was bound to become an appropriate occasion for wider reflections on the culture wars of the Victorian age and of the post-Victorian world to which the book is directly addressed. The chapter also considers his other works: Heretics, Charles Dickens, and The Ball and the Cross.
Sarah Winter
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780823233526
- eISBN:
- 9780823241132
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823233526.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories ...
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What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, this book illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Examining a set of Dickens's most popular novels from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, the book shows how his serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning and reading founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens's serial novels consistently lead readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience, thus channeling their personal memories of Dickens's “unforgettable” scenes and characters into a public reception reaching across social classes. Dickens's celebrity authorship represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain and the United States consolidated Dickens's heterogeneous constituency of readers into the “mass” populations served by national and state school systems; however, Dickens's beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education. The book traces how the reading of serial fiction emerged as a widespread practice and a new medium of modern mass culture.Less
What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, this book illuminates the ways that Dickens's serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction associated with the growth of periodical publication in the nineteenth century but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Examining a set of Dickens's most popular novels from The Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend, the book shows how his serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning and reading founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens's serial novels consistently lead readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience, thus channeling their personal memories of Dickens's “unforgettable” scenes and characters into a public reception reaching across social classes. Dickens's celebrity authorship represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth-century educational reforms in Britain and the United States consolidated Dickens's heterogeneous constituency of readers into the “mass” populations served by national and state school systems; however, Dickens's beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education. The book traces how the reading of serial fiction emerged as a widespread practice and a new medium of modern mass culture.
Michiel Heyns
- Published in print:
- 1994
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198182702
- eISBN:
- 9780191673870
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182702.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic ...
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This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic representation and the mechanics of social control. These are Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. Scapegoating is, as René Girard has shown, a mob effect, the mobilisation of the prejudices of a society in times of crisis. If one defines the literary scapegoat as that figure that has to bear the burden of guilt of a particular community, usually by being sacrificed or expelled, then, in the model, the narrative itself constitutes a community, generating pressures that eventually expel those characters that disturb the equilibrium which it is the aim of narrative closure to restore. The book attempts to gauge the pressures generated by narrative to void it of those elements impeding the resolution, but also to record the countervailing resistance of realist representation to the coercion of closure.Less
This book examines five central realist novels, in relation to one another and other works, hoping to demonstrate both the connectedness and the dissimilarity of the dynamics of novelistic representation and the mechanics of social control. These are Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, and Henry James's The Golden Bowl. Scapegoating is, as René Girard has shown, a mob effect, the mobilisation of the prejudices of a society in times of crisis. If one defines the literary scapegoat as that figure that has to bear the burden of guilt of a particular community, usually by being sacrificed or expelled, then, in the model, the narrative itself constitutes a community, generating pressures that eventually expel those characters that disturb the equilibrium which it is the aim of narrative closure to restore. The book attempts to gauge the pressures generated by narrative to void it of those elements impeding the resolution, but also to record the countervailing resistance of realist representation to the coercion of closure.
John M. Picker
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195151916
- eISBN:
- 9780199787944
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195151916.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for ...
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This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of nationality, professionalism, and the body. These ongoing battles over sound were concretely as well as conceptually territorial. Even as those opposed proclaimed as their principal goal the removal of music from the streets throughout the City and West London, including Belgravia, Kensington, and Chelsea, they endeavored to maintain clear boundaries in three main interrelated and at times overlapping areas: first, defending the purity of English national identity and culture against the taint of foreign infiltration; second, upholding economic and social divisions between the lower classes and middle-class professionals; and third, protecting the frail, afflicted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music. The chapter considers the verbal and visual responses of large numbers of Londoners, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, to the strains of a powerful threat.Less
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of nationality, professionalism, and the body. These ongoing battles over sound were concretely as well as conceptually territorial. Even as those opposed proclaimed as their principal goal the removal of music from the streets throughout the City and West London, including Belgravia, Kensington, and Chelsea, they endeavored to maintain clear boundaries in three main interrelated and at times overlapping areas: first, defending the purity of English national identity and culture against the taint of foreign infiltration; second, upholding economic and social divisions between the lower classes and middle-class professionals; and third, protecting the frail, afflicted bodies of (English, middle-class) invalids from the invasive, debilitating effects of (foreign, lower-class) street music. The chapter considers the verbal and visual responses of large numbers of Londoners, including Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and John Leech, to the strains of a powerful threat.
