DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

This article has three intentions. It starts with the name "Mudfog" as this appears in Dickens, and as the combination of mud and fog – why these? – runs throughout Dickens's prose and his settings, and his interests. It gives particular attention here to Bleak House and Little Dorrit and Great Expectations. Second, it is interested in thinking of mud and fog not as "symbols," but as modes of thinking (definable as allegorical), and here it pursues Dickens's reading of Shakespeare by looking at the uses of mud and fog as they accumulate from Shakespeare's plays. It attempts to read Dickens not as merely drawing on Shakespeare but as enabling a reading of Shakespeare in turn – here discussion of Hamlet becomes crucial for a reading of Bleak House.

Abstract:

Most modern biographies of Dickens refer to his first major assignment for the Morning Chronicle: a trip to Edinburgh to report on a Festival in honor of Lord Grey. The visit has become celebrated by the inclusion, in the resulting newspaper copy, of a 238-word passage which, it has been remarked, "would not have been out of place in one of Boz's Monthly tales" (Slater 43). The present paper considers the fiercely bipartisan political atmosphere at the time, its expression in the contemporary press, and the impact on it of the famous passage. It is suggested that a jokey contemporary comment on the passage represents the earliest recovered quasi-personification of Dickens's authorial presence.

Abstract:

Charles Dickens's involvement in the 9 June 1865 Staplehurst Rail Crash was a traumatic event that resonated with the author for the remainder of his life (which ended five years to the day of the accident). This article merges examinations of Dickens's symptoms of what is now termed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the Staplehurst Rail Crash, auxiliary personal events that may have contributed to his PTSD, and his position as a public figure who controlled his image and expressed himself through his fiction and nonfiction works. Combining these three means of understanding Dickens's PTSD provides further insight into how Dickens attempted to use his authorial identity and writing to control the trauma that haunted him.

Reviewed by:

• The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 by Michael Wheeler
• Dominic Rainsford (bio)

The historical/literary "year book" is something of a twenty-first century publishing phenomenon, ranging from Eric H. Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed to Christopher Bray's 1965: The Year Modern Britain was Born – and probably beyond. There are at least two books just about 1922 (Jackson and Rabaté). Well-received examples pegged to a single literary author include James Shapiro's Shakespeare books, centered on 1599 and 1606 respectively; and something comparable has been done for Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, whose Turning Point is about both Dickens and "the World" in 1851. The book on 1845 to be considered here, however, is most clearly comparable with those that have attended to the social, cultural, and political history of a single Victorian year while drawing upon a fairly broad range of literary authors. Michael Wheeler's notable predecessors in this more specific category include Carl Dawson, whose Victorian Noon concerned 1850, and Rosemary Ashton, whose One Hot Summer told us about 1858 (including, in both cases, a lot about Dickens).

Dawson, in 1977, asks himself whether there is "after all, any intrinsic connection between the literary events of a given year?" and admits to having "no overriding thesis" (xii, xiii) – but assures his readers that ample proof of the pudding will be discovered in the eating. Ashton, seeing herself as contributing to what, by 2017, was a well-established genre of "microhistory," makes a more formal claim for the heuristic value of a methodology that "can uncover hitherto hidden connections, patterns, and structures" (5). Wheeler does not refer to these or any other previous "year books," but a view similar to Ashton's is implicit in The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age. He acknowledges "that history is not neatly parcelled up into calendar years and that some of [his] stories extend into the months that precede and follow 1845," but he believes "that Victorian England defined itself in [End Page 275] response" to a particularly powerful set of interrelated "challenges" in what John Forster, in The Life of Charles Dickens, calls "that prodigious year of excitement and disaster" (qtd. Wheeler, Year 8).

The most important of these "challenges," or "crises," in Wheeler's view, occurred "in the workhouses […]; in parliament, where a failed harvest and potato blight in Ireland made Peel's abolitio

Reviewed by:

• Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship by Christine Skelton
• Lillian Nayder (bio)

"Servant housekeeper": with these two words, Georgina Hogarth – a younger sister of Catherine Dickens and the sister-in-law of Catherine's estranged husband – is identified on the 1861 census returns for 3, Hanover Terrace, Marylebone, presumably by Charles Dickens himself (133). In her engaging book on the relationship between Georgina and her famous brother-in-law, Christine Skelton uses this phrase to underscore the anomalous and evolving position of Miss Hogarth within the novelist's family, its members lodged in temporary quarters at the time. More precisely, the phrase registers Georgina's oddly "reduced" position in the 1861 household (133), nearly three years after Catherine, the original Miss Hogarth, had been pressured to leave the family home by Dickens, and Georgina stayed behind. Having been the "little pet" of the novelist when she first moved in with the couple in 1842 (47) and, in the later 1840s and the 1850s, the novelist's vivacious and attractive companion and assistant, Georgina now appeared a figure who seemed to emerge from "below stairs" (134). Her servant-like status points to the complexities and contradictions of her "favored" position as the alleged surrogate of her older sister, long the mistress of the house, and it underscores the price she paid for what her father considered her "mistaken sense of duty" to the novelist (Nayder 261, qtd. Skelton 124).

As Skelton repeatedly shows us, Georgina's service to Dickens as well as the tone in which he sometimes issued his "edicts" to her (160), make the tag of "servant housekeeper" seem apt: "In the middle drawer of my wardrobe are a dress coat and a pair of dress trousers," the novelist wrote her in January 1867. "Will you with the end of a clean towel and Eau de Cologne from my scent case – cleanse them, by daylight, where they are splashed" (Letters 11: 296–97; qtd. Skelton 161). Skelton provides a telling list of such duties and instructions, as Dickens increasingly curtailed what had once been Georgina's greater autonomy, subjecting her to criticism and surveillance.

Skelton prepares readers for her analysis of this "curious" and lasting relationship with an opening chapter on the first years of the Dickenses' marriage, and then another focused largely on the writer's flirtatious behavior [End Page 271] toward young women other than his wife. Arranged in chronological order, seven of the eight chapters that follow cover specific (and

Reviewed by:

• Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism ed. by Christopher Ricks
• Jeremy Tambling (bio)

Eleven volumes are due to appear of the Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), lawyer, colonial administrator in India and historian of criminal law, brother to Leslie Stephen and uncle to Virginia Woolf. He was the son of a British Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, Wilberforcian, and instrumental in the ending of slavery in the British colonies. Of those volumes already out, edited overall by Christopher Ricks, Jan-Melissa Schramm, and at first, by Frances Whistler, this one, "On the Novel and Journalism," edited by Ricks, comprises much of his writing for the Saturday Review, which, starting in 1855, coincides with the period of Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities, both of which Stephen notices. The volume, excellently edited by Ricks, with grateful cross-referencing of the critical work of Lisa Rodensky, is stimulating reading and essential for reading Dickens, for several reasons.

First, Stephen gives an important context for the contemporary reception of Dickens, and of the novel. His hostility (it is hardly too strong to call it that) to the latter recalls an informal nineteenth-century debate where Jane Austen was on the opposite side from Carlyle and Arnold (the latter especially in relation to Charlotte Brontë), and where history, the classics, and poetry were regarded as higher. It may be hard to comprehend for those coming after Bakhtin's arguments about the novel, but the form has had to struggle against drama and poetry, and against "harder" forms of "light" reading (e.g. history), and especially in view of what irked Stephen: that the novel was inseparable from journalism, a word which, appearing in the 1830s, both defined some of Stephen's own writing, and disturbed him profoundly for its lesser commitment to truth than obtains in law, and for its function as merely affording amusement, like the novel. Any reader of Victorian culture ought to be familiar with Stephen, and his astringency in writing about issues which have only further mutated – as Ricks, who has a nice note on his dependence on Wikipedia, indicates in referring to "social media" (170, xix). Part of Stephen's anxiety is that his criticism will be seen to partake of mere journalism.

Second, Stephen is very interesting on Dickens, whom he has obviously read intensively, as he has read other novels, including French literature. Thus, there is an excellent treatment of Manon Lescaut, an

Abstract:

This article seeks to revise the orthodox opinćions about Dickens as a "superficial" novelist who is unable to delve into the souls of his characters and depict their interiority. Since the introspective elements in Dickens are worthy of more attention than they have received, I critically dissect two passages in which Dickens dramatizes the mental operations of two criminals (Sikes and Fagin) at a moment of crisis in Oliver Twist. As I argue, the vigour and intensity of the novelist's portrayal of these characters' inwardness and mental activity draw heavily on eye imagery, its symbolic implications, and metaphors of seeing, which focuses all textual eyes together with the reader's eyes on the two malefactors. The internal focalizations of Sikes and Fagin deserve a particular critical interest because of their significant impact on the cultural afterlives of the novel, which this essay also discusses.

Abstract:

In this article, I analyze the progression of Louisa Gradgrind's imaginative and emotional interior life in Charles Dickens's Hard Times. I integrate Gaston Bachelard's theory of the intrinsic relationship between imagination and architectural spaces in The Poetics of Space (1958) with Cassandra Falke's theoretical approach to learning empathy through reading literature in The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) in order to create a critical framework. This framework then illustrates Dickens's use of domestic spaces to guide his readers experientially through Louisa's interior healing and development throughout the novel. I argue that Dickens desires his readers to believe by the end of Louisa's story that this inner wholeness is also possible and achievable for them through reading literature.

Abstract:

This article explores the function and significance of "extra-illustrations" by discussing the steel-engraved plates of two episodes in Barnaby Rudge by Thomas Sibson (1817–44) in relation to Hablot Knight Browne's (1815–82) wood-engravings of the same scenes. While Browne's designs are carefully integrated into the text by meticulous placement, Sibson's plates were intended to stand alone in a frame or collector's portfolio. Browne take us deeper into the story by intensifying the drama of the moment, whereas Sibson often makes allusions that take the viewer beyond the narrative. The comparison between Sibson's and Browne's methods reveals a range of issues pertaining to British illustration culture and practices of the 1840s, showing particularly how the differences in form, mode, timing of issue, the presence or absence of captions, and the circumstances of display affected reception.

• The Dickens Checklist
• Dominic Rainsford (bio)

The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online resources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative cross-referenced edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at dickenssociety.org, and is updated once a year.

Dominic Rainsford is Professor of Literature in English at Aarhus University. His recent work on Dickens includes "1827: Real, Fictional, and Mythic Time in The Pickwick Papers," in From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria, vol. 7 (U of Warsaw P, 2021) and "Political Art and the Art of Politics" in The Edinburgh Companion to Dickens and the Arts (Edinburgh UP, 2024).

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