Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0004
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter looks at periodical publication as a third form of representation undergoing modernization in the 1830s, with a focus on Dickens’s first serial novel, The Pickwick Papers. First, it examines The Mirror of Parliament as a commercial enterprise from the perspective of its rivals like The Parliamentary Review and Family Magazine. Second, it considers how the Parliamentary Papers (or blue books) sought to re-present the People through new kinds of literature, combining numbers and words, derived from verbatim testimony. Third, it reveals the parliamentary subtexts of The Pickwick Papers, including its references to Henry Brougham, a major figure in the First Reformed Parliament. It does this in part by tracing Dickens’s debt to a previous pictorial series by Robert Seymour (the original Pickwick artist), a satire of Brougham called The Schoolmaster Abroad. Finally, it links the breach of privilege with which Pickwick begins to the breach of promise suit with which it ends. Throughout, it emphasizes the lulling qualities of verbatim reporting and the “hearing” of voices on paper.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0005
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter reads Oliver Twist (1837–9) as a tale of two Parliamentary Papers: the Poor Law Commission Report of 1834 and the Prisons Report of 1836. In so doing, it traces the convergence of domestic and colonial reform in Parliament in the period between the abolition of slavery in 1833 and emancipation in 1838—the period when British colonial slaves were controversially retained by their masters as “apprentices.” It begins with Stockdale v. Hansard, a case of libel arising from the Prisons Report, which was only resolved by the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840. This trial coincided with the first installments of Oliver Twist in February 1837. To draw out connections between the blue books summarized in The Mirror of Parliament and Dickens’s emerging fiction, the chapter examines Oliver Twist in light of the parliamentary reports, with an eye for “vagabonds”: those who escaped their bonds as workers, prisoners, or slaves. It considers how Dickens’s disenfranchised characters are constructed from the tissues of parliamentary publications and brought to life by the novelist’s response to them. Finally, it stresses the transatlantic dimensions of Dickens’s early fiction—including the reference to cotton “twist” in Oliver’s name.
{"title":"Vagabonds","authors":"Carolyn Vellenga Berman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter reads Oliver Twist (1837–9) as a tale of two Parliamentary Papers: the Poor Law Commission Report of 1834 and the Prisons Report of 1836. In so doing, it traces the convergence of domestic and colonial reform in Parliament in the period between the abolition of slavery in 1833 and emancipation in 1838—the period when British colonial slaves were controversially retained by their masters as “apprentices.” It begins with Stockdale v. Hansard, a case of libel arising from the Prisons Report, which was only resolved by the Parliamentary Papers Act of 1840. This trial coincided with the first installments of Oliver Twist in February 1837. To draw out connections between the blue books summarized in The Mirror of Parliament and Dickens’s emerging fiction, the chapter examines Oliver Twist in light of the parliamentary reports, with an eye for “vagabonds”: those who escaped their bonds as workers, prisoners, or slaves. It considers how Dickens’s disenfranchised characters are constructed from the tissues of parliamentary publications and brought to life by the novelist’s response to them. Finally, it stresses the transatlantic dimensions of Dickens’s early fiction—including the reference to cotton “twist” in Oliver’s name.","PeriodicalId":197214,"journal":{"name":"Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128604195","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0007
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter argues that Hard Times (1854), the Dickens novel that is most openly critical of government publications, is paradoxically the one that most resembles them. Whereas Oliver Twist turns blue book themes into a riveting fairy tale, Hard Times pairs a thematic insistence on fairy tales with a mimicry of blue book forms. The chapter reads Hard Times as a commentary on reports concerning working-class education, including a controversial 1847 report on education in Wales. It links Dickens’s “Report of the First meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything” (1837) to his depiction of the dangers of statistics and testimony in Hard Times. Looking anew at Dickens’s attack on the blue books in Hard Times illuminates a crucial scene in the history of public knowledge as well as the history of the novel.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0003
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter is devoted to parliamentary reform and the art of representing the People—two topics that engaged Dickens’s fervent interest as a writer and reporter. It emphasizes the role played by the media in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Reporting the parliamentary debates remained an official breach of privilege until after Dickens’s death, though it was tolerated. The chapter asks how the private is made public in fiction and journalism from The Mirror of Parliament to Dickens’s parliamentary sketches. It offers a history of parliamentary reform intertwined with Dickens’s own family history, while examining the pressures on Parliament to offer a “mirror” of the nation. Next, it returns to Gurney’s Brachygraphy, showing how the unconscious satire of its practice texts concerning legitimate rule reverberated in Dickens’s fiction. The chapter ends with Dickens’s first contracted novel, Barnaby Rudge, a tale of the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reads this historical novel as both a response to parliamentary history and a re-presentation of events Dickens witnessed: the anti-Catholic riots leading to parliamentary reform. These events produced the “breach” birth of Dickens as a writer.
{"title":"Breach of Privilege","authors":"Carolyn Vellenga Berman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter is devoted to parliamentary reform and the art of representing the People—two topics that engaged Dickens’s fervent interest as a writer and reporter. It emphasizes the role played by the media in the passage of the Reform Act of 1832. Reporting the parliamentary debates remained an official breach of privilege until after Dickens’s death, though it was tolerated. The chapter asks how the private is made public in fiction and journalism from The Mirror of Parliament to Dickens’s parliamentary sketches. It offers a history of parliamentary reform intertwined with Dickens’s own family history, while examining the pressures on Parliament to offer a “mirror” of the nation. Next, it returns to Gurney’s Brachygraphy, showing how the unconscious satire of its practice texts concerning legitimate rule reverberated in Dickens’s fiction. The chapter ends with Dickens’s first contracted novel, Barnaby Rudge, a tale of the Gordon Riots of 1780. It reads this historical novel as both a response to parliamentary history and a re-presentation of events Dickens witnessed: the anti-Catholic riots leading to parliamentary reform. These events produced the “breach” birth of Dickens as a writer.","PeriodicalId":197214,"journal":{"name":"Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130357136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0002
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter focuses on reporting, examining Dickens’s apprenticeship to reading and writing shorthand through Gurney’s Brachygraphy, as it is depicted in David Copperfield, in order to reconsider the relationship between parliamentary representation and print culture. Though we have long known about shorthand as an element of Dickens’s career, we have not yet seized its role as a fulcrum for media, politics, literature, and print in the nineteenth century. Writing was one of several “arts of representation” being modernized early in Dickens’s career. The chapter examines Gurney’s manual alongside claims for shorthand as a modern form of writing, excerpts from Dickens’s autobiographical fragment, and Dickens’s fiction. Shorthand was a crucial part of the ecosystem of news publication, but it was profoundly incompatible with print. It was at once a technology for breaching parliamentary privilege and a means of fostering secrecy through cryptography. The chapter untangles the dense political history of Victorian writing.
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Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1007/springerreference_183642
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
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Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0009
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter asks how Our Mutual Friend recycles a key metaphor from Hard Times, where Members of Parliament were “national dustmen” who seemed to “owe no duty to an abstraction called a People.” It does so by following the coal dust across Dickens’s writings. In particular, it looks at Dickens’s response to the blue books about coal mines, along with the employment of a literary man, Richard Horne, as a blue book commissioner and an industrial correspondent for Dickens’s Household Words. It examines the intertextual relationship of Dickens’s novel with Horne’s articles, including “Dust; or Ugliness Redeemed,” “The Black Diamonds of England,” and “A Coal Miner’s Evidence.” Reading Our Mutual Friend as “industrial fiction,” the chapter emphasizes Dickens’s attempt to redeem the decomposing forms of national literature, in the lead-up to the Representation of the People Act of 1867.
本章询问《我们共同的朋友》如何重复使用《艰难时期》中的一个关键比喻，即国会议员是“国家清洁工”，他们似乎“对一个被称为人民的抽象概念不负任何责任”。这是通过追踪狄更斯作品中的煤尘来实现的。特别地，它着眼于狄更斯对关于煤矿的蓝皮书的反应，以及聘请一位文学家理查德·霍恩(Richard Horne)作为蓝皮书专员和狄更斯《家喻户晓的话语》的工业通讯员。它考察了狄更斯的小说与霍恩的文章的互文关系，包括“尘埃;《丑陋的救赎》、《英格兰的黑钻石》和《一个矿工的证据》。将《我们共同的朋友》解读为“工业小说”，这一章强调了狄更斯在1867年《人民代表法案》(Representation of the People Act)颁布之前试图挽救民族文学的腐朽形式。
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Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0010
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
The Coda compares the initial excitement about the democratic possibilities of the internet in the twenty-first century—and subsequent fears concerning the political effects of social media and the resurgence of populism—with nineteenth-century responses to the proliferation of printed paper. It likens the early Victorian debates about allowing the reporting of debates to experiments with regulating communication through Twitter and Facebook. It then reveals how recent events have refocused our attention on both representative democracy and the book as fragile formations. It links recent proposals for adjusting the effects of social media to Dickens’s own efforts on copyright. Finally, it shows how Dickens’s satirical proposals anticipated dystopian aspects of our current world of smartphones and the attention economy.
{"title":"Coda","authors":"Carolyn Vellenga Berman","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"The Coda compares the initial excitement about the democratic possibilities of the internet in the twenty-first century—and subsequent fears concerning the political effects of social media and the resurgence of populism—with nineteenth-century responses to the proliferation of printed paper. It likens the early Victorian debates about allowing the reporting of debates to experiments with regulating communication through Twitter and Facebook. It then reveals how recent events have refocused our attention on both representative democracy and the book as fragile formations. It links recent proposals for adjusting the effects of social media to Dickens’s own efforts on copyright. Finally, it shows how Dickens’s satirical proposals anticipated dystopian aspects of our current world of smartphones and the attention economy.","PeriodicalId":197214,"journal":{"name":"Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper","volume":"66 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-02-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131033877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-02-10DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192845405.003.0006
Carolyn Vellenga Berman
This chapter highlights the satirical realism of Bleak House (1852–3) and traces the novel’s profound engagement with the Parliamentary Papers. After just seven numbers of Bleak House had appeared, the retired Lord Chief Justice Denman attacked Dickens for a belated show of reform, comparing his work unfavorably to the bestselling Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This chapter argues that Dickens attacked the Court of Chancery too late precisely to draw attention to the long period of time it had taken Parliament to reform Chancery. It reads Dickens’s critique of Chancery (and indirectly of the House of Lords) in light of the burning and rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament. It buttresses this case by reading Dickens’s “A Haunted House,” a sketch of the 1852 election. It argues that Bleak House holds out an unflattering mirror of Parliament, exposing its possibly constitutional failure, and finds the novel infused with traces of slavery and the slave trade as marks of British national shame.
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