DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

Abstract:

A short commentary by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough on the gossip surrounding the breakdown of the Dickens marriage in a letter to an American friend in June 1858 provides a glimpse of how it appeared to one literary Londoner not having a close personal acquaintance with the family. The information (and misinformation) Clough drew on appears to include material derived from Dickens's as then unpublished (later "violated") letter of 25 May. Unlike accounts transmitted to American newspapers by London correspondents which propagated stories concerning an actress, Clough's account mentions Georgina Hogarth as the subject of the "scandalous rumours." He thus tenders a version of the gossip which seems otherwise to have been largely transmitted orally. Clough's characterization of Catherine as "lunatical," well before Dickens's letter of 25 May with its reference to his wife's alleged "mental disorder," comprises the earliest known written reference to this aspect of Dickens's narrative.

Abstract:

Created six years apart, Scrooge and Pickwick exhibit extraordinary similarities in their backgrounds and plot trajectories. Scrooge and Pickwick start out as relatively isolated businessmen who make journeys of discovery and learn lessons in compassion. Their metamorphoses are deepened through their relationships with loyal employees. This article explores the scant details about the two men's business lives, including Scrooge's role as a creditor and his connection to the Second Royal Exchange in London, which burned down in January 1838. It also contextualizes Pickwick's ties to the South American sugar trade and the enslaved labor that contributes to his great wealth. The article speculates on the parallelisms between Scrooge and Pickwick and the effects of seeing them both within the scope of their identified business practices.

Reviewed by:

• Screening Charles Dickens: A Survey of Film and Television Adaptations by William Farina
• Adam Abraham (bio)

The topic of Dickens and film is a promising one. Almost as soon as there were motion pictures, there were motion pictures based on the works of Charles Dickens. In 1897, just a few years after the first movies were projected, a New York-based film company produced Death of Nancy Sykes [sic], now apparently lost. D. W. Griffith, a pioneering director, learned techniques of cross-cutting and parallel action from Dickens's multiplot novels – a connection that Sergei Eisenstein articulates in a 1944 essay. Earlier books have explored this terrain, including Charles Dickens on the Screen (Pointer, 1996), Dickens on Screen (Glavin, 2003), Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Smith, 2003), and works dedicated to the many versions of A Christmas Carol (Guida, 2000) or Great Expectations (McFarlane, 2008). Into this array enters Screening Charles Dickens, which proposes to update the field of knowledge.

Its author, William Farina, is something of a polymath. He has written a biography of Ulysses S. Grant; books on dogs, cabaret, and Arthurian romance; and a 2006 volume entitled De Vere as Shakespeare, an exploration of anti-Stratfordian theory. His analytical gaze now turns to cinematic and televisual adaptations of Dickens. In the new book's introduction, he argues that "the novels and short stories of Dickens have become nearly synonymous with the history of filmmaking" (1). By the end, he concludes, "Each generation needs its own versions of Copperfield, Pip, Heep, Scrooge, and Fagin (among many others), proving yet again the durability and indestructability of Dickens' storytelling art" (195). Both of these sentiments ring true; however, the pages that fall in between are tedious, repetitious, and marred by errors.

Farina has a tendency to say that which does not need to be said, like the legendary penny-a-liner increasing his or her word count. In the chapter on Dombey and Son, we learn the following: "By the late 1960s, much had changed from the 1930s" (91). For readers who are thus confused by points of chronology, the author explains that Alec Guinness appeared in a 1939 stage play "long before" his role in Star Wars, in 1977 (151). Further, we are told that Jim Carrey is a "celebrity star," which is unnecessary and redundant (66). Among the more unhelpful details is Farina's use of inclusive dates of death and birth for individuals. Within two consecutive s

Reviewed by:

• Reading Bodies in Victorian Fiction: Associationism, Empathy and Literary Authority by Peter J. Katz
• Christian Lehmann (bio)

The opening participle in Peter Katz's new book, Reading Bodies, is ambiguous. Are the character bodies doing the reading? Are we reading the characters or the characters each other? Is it our own bodies that are reading? Over the course of six chapters and five novelists, Katz continually disrupts our understanding of what it means to read and who does the reading. But Katz is not interested in the meta-literary; rather he attempts to return us to the experience – and stakes – of the reading public in the nineteenth century. He traces a schism between academic writers and readers against popular authors and their general reading public, for whom literacy rates rose to 81% for men and 73% for women by 1871 (93). For the academic writer and reader (e.g. Matthew Arnold and Max Müller), reading is about power and authority; these (almost always) men get to interpret and lay claim to someone else's experience (think about Edward Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies). In contrast are the popular novelists that populate Katz's chapters. "Reading, these novelists have suggested, can be a place to reject knowledge, and even to reject a kind of false acknowledgement that only seeks authority. When read well – with feeling, for feeling, about feeling – novels can cultivate not authority, but an ethics of care" (188). This ethics of care is the "Empathy" in Katz's subtitle. [End Page 493] He claims that these novelists grounded their appeal for empathetic reading in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science of Associationism. At its most general, Associationism claims that our sensations are absorbed first and then turned into rational understanding in ever more complicated ways along associative pathways. Katz's specific interest is in Associationism's understanding of language, which considers "language not as a force that shapes matter discursively, nor as a byproduct of material forces, but rather as part of a biological process in an embodied, social species" (5). Thus, reading the words on a page changes the way we interact in social space.

The first chapter sets the background for Katz's argument as he introduces us to the philosophical debates, the scientific and philosophical practitioners, and the cultural background to his arguments about reading and Associationism. There is a dizzying array of names, but Katz ably guides the reader through the evolving thinking through helpful subsections. Chapter 2 is

Abstract:

This article examines the role of the criminal lawyer Mr. Jaggers in Great Expectations, arguing that beyond his function as the hidden link between Miss Havisham and Abel Magwitch, his masculine vulnerability before the pretty little child who becomes Estella is an essential plot element. Jaggers's decision to save this child from poverty, and perhaps prostitution, characterizes the lawyer as Dickens's main authorial collaborator and key plotter. Jaggers's actions, wholly disclosed in Chapter 51, characterize him thus as a fully rounded minor or supporting character. His motivations to rescue Estella, however, are ambiguous, appearing to be either an example of compassionate chivalry or, in a darker reading, a strategy to control his sexual impulses.