DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

Reflecting on Miss Havisham, one of the most famous ghosts in the marriage plot, this personal essay considers the importance of having space to grieve. While living as a lodger in my colleague’s home after ending my marriage, I dreamed of Miss Havisham’s Satis House: a space of my own where I could decay alongside the scraps, fragments, and stuff that makes a life. But when I moved into my apartment, I identified more with Catherine Dickens who mourned her mistreatment by Charles but moved on all the same. Ultimately, this essay celebrates the love that appears minor in the marriage plot but is major during separation.

Reviewed by:

• Dickens and Travel: The Start of Modern Travel Writing by Lucinda Hawksley
• Nathalie Vanfasse (bio)

Dickens and Travel: the Start of Modern Travel Writing was written by Lucinda Hawksley, descendant from Henry Fielding Dickens, Dickens’s eighth child. The monograph focuses on Dickens as a traveler and on the numerous peregrinations he undertook during his life. It chimes with other monographs touching upon Dickens and travel published in recent years such as Jonathan Grossman’s Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (2013); Ruth Livesey’s Writing the Stagecoach Nation (2016), and the present author’s La Plume et la route, Dickens écrivainvoyageur (2017). These in turn resonated with work conducted on Dickens on France (2007) by John Edmonson, and Dickens in Italy (2009) by Michael Hollington and Francesca Orestano. Dickens and Travel plunges readers into the different trips Dickens made during his career. It also considers how these journeys influenced his fiction. Lucinda Hawksley provides readers with a wealth of details and anecdotes that recreate the spirit and atmosphere of these visits. The book brings together Dickens’s personal life, his writing – and particularly his fiction – in relation to the various trips and stays Dickens made. It retraces his journeys in the British Isles and abroad, as he travelled there alone, or with his wife, family and/or with friends.

The book follows Dickens’s life and career. It tackles for instance Dickens’s first journeys as a journalist or as a newlywed, and his journey of investigation with Phiz for his novel Nicholas Nickleby. It touches upon Dickens’s taste for watering places, as well as his visits to Scotland, Wales and Ireland. In addition to that, a few sections of the book are devoted to Dickens’s tour of North America. Dickens’s journey to Italy also occupies pride of place in the monograph. Another chapter covers Switzerland. Two chapters consider Dickens’s Francophilia and his passion for Paris and Boulogne. Hawksley also alludes to Dickens and Wilkie Collins’s Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, as well as Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller. The last few chapters are devoted to the railways, to Dickens’s return to America, and to Dickens’s ideas of Australia.

The book begins with an allusion to stagecoaches which Hawksley relates to Dickens’s childhood memories as well as to the setting of Dickens’s career in motion (2). An amusing anecdote about a fleet of stagecoaches whose sides were emblaz

Abstract:

“Dickensian Dimensions” makes use of Dickens’s manuscript revisions to uncover the extra dimensions of emotional depth and temporal complexity that his sentences acquire in the immediate midst of composition. When the effects of those little changes were offered to a group of serious ordinary readers in the UK, their responses to selected passages from David Copperfield showed how much the tiny revisions could matter emotionally. The second part of the essay considers revised passages from Dickens’s next first-person narrator, Esther Summerson of Bleak House. We suggest that Esther’s apparently coy evasions can be more sympathetically read as writing problems stemming from her existential situation as a virtual non-person.

• The Dickens Society Prizes

The David Paroissien Prize

The David Paroissien Prize is awarded each year to the best peer-reviewed essay on Dickens published in a journal or edited collection. The Prize is named for David Paroissien, a founding member of the Dickens Society and also the founder of Dickens Quarterly, which he edited from its first issue in 1984 until his final issue in December 2019. As an editor he was rigorous, tactful, and generous, particularly with younger scholars. Under his direction, Dickens Quarterly attracted contributions from Dickens scholars around the world and became a leading venue for new work in the field.

To nominate (or self-nominate) an essay for the Paroissien Prize, please provide a copy of the essay and a cover email giving the name, email address, and institutional affiliation (if any) of its author. For the 2023 competition (essays published 1 January 2023 – 31 December 2023), send these materials to the Society Secretary at dickenssocietysecretary@gmail.com by 31 January 2024. A three-person committee comprised of Officers and/or Trustees will judge submissions. Please note that, in determining an essay's eligibility for a given year, the actual date of appearance is what matters, not the nominal date of the journal issue, since it is common for journals to lag behind their publication date. Any author may be nominated for this Prize, whether or not they are a Society member. The Prize carries a cash award of $500 and waives the registration fee for the Symposium at which the recipient will be recognized.

The Partlow Prize

The Partlow Prize may be in the form of either one stipend of $500 or two of $300 (if two recipients are chosen), and is intended to defray costs of attending the Dickens Symposium, in order to deliver a paper on any aspect of Dickens's life or work. The registration fee and cost of the Dickens Dinner will also be waived. Eligibility is restricted to students (graduate or undergraduate), independent scholars, and non-tenured faculty. Candidates should submit a CV and a completed paper of 20 minutes' duration, to the organizer by the requested date. Should the paper be of publishable quality, Dickens Quarterly shall have first right of refusal. [End Page 519]

Reviewed by:

• Dickens, Death, and Christmas by Robert L. Patten
• Natalie J. McKnight (bio)

In this beautifully illustrated, richly contextualized study, Robert Patten traces the often surprising and deeply-rooted connections between death and Christmas festivities in Dickens's Christmas books and in his own experiences of the winter solstice holidays. Patten begins with a vivid description of the Paris morgue and its theatrical display of corpses, a site Dickens frequently visited, often around the winter holidays. It's a striking Prologue with its gruesome details of dead bodies on display, sometimes as if in conversation with each other, and it effectively establishes the key intertwining themes of the book: death and rebirth, remembering and forgetting, ghoulishness and festivity. It also highlights that Patten is writing not just for scholars but for a broader audience of Dickens enthusiasts. The lively writing of the Prologue, which immerses the reader in the sensory details of the scene in a manner few scholarly works ever do, continues throughout the book, and makes Dickens, Death, and Christmas not only extremely informative but also a pleasure to read.

Patten divides the book into 12 chapters, one on each of Dickens's five Christmas books, plus ones on Dickens's visits to the morgue, his early experiences with Christmas, Yuletide as seen in The Pickwick Papers, the social evils that motivated Dickens to strike "sledge hammer blows" in his holiday narratives, Christmas celebrations in the 1840s (including celebrations of his oldest son's birthday on Twelfth Night), the Christmas numbers Dickens penned and performed after the publication of the Christmas books, and finally a closing chapter on endings and their implications in life and fiction. In every chapter, Patten's vast knowledge of Dickens's life and works, the social fabric of the times, the extensive theatrical adaptations of his fiction, and the varied critical reception of his publications provide illuminating contexts that will probably surprise even seasoned Dickens scholars.

Of course, no one should be surprised by such erudition from such a renowned scholar. Still, having written on A Christmas Carol myself, I foolishly thought there wouldn't be much new for me in the chapter devoted to that book. I of course was wrong. Patten's interpretation of the Carol as an epillion, or small epic, provides a helpful framework for Scrooge's journey [End Page 488] and "makes the voices channeled in the fourth Stave [and elsewhere] more resonant" (103). Patten's analyses of the illustrations – for the Carol