DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

Dickens plays off the strange hybrid nature of hair throughout his fiction. Hair is both alive and dead, public but also private, part of and not part of the body. Dickens uses hair to create both comedy and pathos, and it projects key aspects of many characters while simultaneously defying their control. Through hair, Dickens raises epistemological questions about the human tendency to categorize the world in binaries, and he suggests that all such categories misrepresent reality and fail to capture the complexity of human experience.

Reviewed by:

• Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman
• Dominic Rainsford (bio)

One might be forgiven for expecting this to be a very dull book. That is certainly the impression created by the unsmiling faces of Ada Lovelace (datalogical prodigy and Byron’s daughter), William Farr (of the General Register Office; subsequently President of the Statistical Society of London), Florence Nightingale, Prince Albert, and Charles Babbage (computer pioneer), which ponderously adorn the dust-jacket. However, it contains a wide range of information and ideas, much of it potentially useful to Dickens scholars, and the good news is that Goldman’s reader will require no “technical knowledge of statistics” (xxxviii).

Following a long Prologue, which jumps ahead to the “Zenith” of Victorian statistics in 1860, the book retreats chronologically and settles into a methodical five-part structure. In Part I, Goldman describes the background to Victorian statistics in the rudimentary “political arithmetic” of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Part II, he describes the establishment of influential statistical societies in the 1820s and 1830s in Cambridge, Manchester, and Clerkenwell. Part III is devoted to chapters on the principal “intellectual influences” on the turn to statistics, including Babbage and Lovelace, Richard Jones (professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London), William Whewell (Cambridge polymath and inventor of the term “scientist”), Adolphe Quetelet (Belgian statistician [End Page 127] and reformer), Alexander von Humboldt, and – as “opposition” – Disraeli, Ruskin, Carlyle, and our man Dickens. Part IV, on “Statistics at Mid-Century,” describes the growing acceptance and practical use of statistics, and especially in the field of medicine – where it could demonstrably be linked to saving lives. Part V contrasts “Conservative Nationalism” with “Liberal Internationalism” at the International Statistical Congresses of the 1850s, 60s and 70s. “Conservative Nationalism” is thereafter shown to develop into something more sinister, and for a time at least this is “The End of the Statistical Movement,” as Francis Galton introduces a far higher level of mathematical sophistication but reveals his “moral inadequacy,” turning from the desire to use numbers to understand and ameliorate society to eugenics, racism, and speculative social engineering. A brief concluding chapter takes us from the nineteenth century to our own time, “From Statistics to Big Data, 1822–2022.”

Abstract:

This article brings a creative–critical approach to bear on my long, and evolving, relationship with Dickens. Through examining the tenacious grip that Dickens has had on my imaginative, emotional, and professional lives, I explore the conundrum of continuing to admire a writer whose ubiquity, personal history, and even style can sometimes cause embarrassment to contemporary publics. In the face of such feelings, and my ambivalence about literary hero-worship, I make a case for Dickens’s unique power and lasting relevance. I explore how Dickens has shaped my creative imagination, education, and work as a university lecturer, and how his writing continues to impact on the lives of friends, family, and students. The article takes the form of a creative–critical personal essay, combining autobiographical accounts of growing up in Dickens’s Kent, and of engaging with Great Expectations at different life stages, with the scholarly perspectives that underpin my publications and university teaching.

Abstract:

Taking the experience of teaching Dickens in Brazil as a point of departure, this essay proposes a brief overview of the novelist’s initial reception in the South American country as part of an ongoing investigation of his multi-layered influence on Brazilian culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. Dickens’s impact on Brazilian publishing and pop culture ranges from the many translated editions of his works to his influence over local writers and artists. The second half of the essay produces a case study of teaching Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities to a class of undergraduate students in Rio de Janeiro, arguing for the importance of allowing students to respond creatively to literary works in an academic setting.

Abstract:

Inspired by a teaching experience in which a group of students equated the mob violence of the French Revolution with the contemporary phenomenon of “cancel culture,” this article considers the ways in which Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities incorporates a consideration of the foundations and limits of celebrity power. By examining contemporary studies of the history and significance of “cancellation,” we can understand their relevance to a Dickens who was anxious about maintaining his celebrity status and controlling his image amid a marital scandal that threatened his ability to do both. Read through this lens, the experience of Doctor Manette, a character who uses his celebrity to protect his loved ones and whose celebrity power is then turned against him, speaks to our present moment as Dickens’s expression of concern at what might happen when a previously adoring public takes the reins of reputation from the prominent.

Abstract:

Classic novels retold for children have received limited scholarly attention. Often cheaply printed, the interest they arouse is also transient: child readers become adults and either lose interest or move on to the unabridged text. Despite their transience and ephemerality, “classic” novels rewritten for children, especially retellings of Dickens, merit scholarly examination. These retellings appeal to child readers by centring the plots that revolve around child characters, shaping the popular imagination and reception history of these works. Since their initial publication, Dickens’s novels have been adapted, abridged, and anthologized for young readers by editors and publishers with various motives: to profit off Dickens’s fame, to promote literacy, and to support social change. Texts that rewrite “classic” authors like Dickens for young audiences reveal our cultural assumptions and anxieties about literacy.

Abstract:

Only by recognizing that Dickens’s novels not only teach us a great deal about Victorian England, but also about our lives in the here and now, can we remain vibrantly one of Dickens’s “publics.” We must transcend the usual “wisdom of the head,” the traditional academic study of his novels, and connect with the “wisdom of the heart” as well, the meaningful student-centred ways that his texts resonate in actual everyday lives – pedagogical advice that Dickens himself famously proffered in Hard Times. In my recent course, “Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture,” my students and I did just that, discovering both Dickens, and his continuing influence on our lives, together during a memorable semester.