Abstract:This article argues that Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) elaborates a remarkable theory of individual and collective memory. On the one hand, Dickens embraces the idea, conventional in early Victorian psychology and philosophy, of the mind as a palimpsest that contains a permanent record of an individual's experiences. On the other, he extends this belief in the indelibility of memory to matter, proposing that the material world functions as a palimpsest of collective history that interacts in uncanny ways with individual recollection. I propose that Dickens's account of material memory adapts mathematician Charles Babbage's hypothesis that the totality of human speech and action is encoded as atomic vibrations in the earth, air, and ocean. In Copperfield, Dickens uses Mr. Dick to explore the implications of Babbage's theory for realist fiction, which, in representing the contemporary world, bears an overwhelming responsibility for the collective history that pervades it.
{"title":"Charles Dickens, Charles Babbage, Richard Babley: Material Memory in David Copperfield","authors":"Lanya Lamouria","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article argues that Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) elaborates a remarkable theory of individual and collective memory. On the one hand, Dickens embraces the idea, conventional in early Victorian psychology and philosophy, of the mind as a palimpsest that contains a permanent record of an individual's experiences. On the other, he extends this belief in the indelibility of memory to matter, proposing that the material world functions as a palimpsest of collective history that interacts in uncanny ways with individual recollection. I propose that Dickens's account of material memory adapts mathematician Charles Babbage's hypothesis that the totality of human speech and action is encoded as atomic vibrations in the earth, air, and ocean. In Copperfield, Dickens uses Mr. Dick to explore the implications of Babbage's theory for realist fiction, which, in representing the contemporary world, bears an overwhelming responsibility for the collective history that pervades it.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"64 - 82"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47809594","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Benjamin D. O'Dell, James Armstrong, Kathryne Ford, Lanya Lamouria, J. Parrott, D. Rainsford, T. Wagner, Robert Sirabian, M. Allen-Emerson
Abstract:The Bildungsroman is a genre concerned with the construction of the individual's relationship with society. Critics have often associated Victorian Bildungsromane with the loss of agency as ideological forces funnel literary characters (and, by extension, their readers) through a series of conventional plot points designed to reinforce a fairly conservative set of middle-class values. This essay complicates such readings by pairing Charles Dickens's paradigmatic Victorian Bildungsroman David Copperfield (1850) with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's progenitor to the genre, Émile (1762). I suggest that setting Dickens's novel against the more philosophically dense and overtly confrontational Émile highlights David Copperfield's vexed relationship with established social codes, supplying the foundation for an important reconsideration of the Bildungsroman's role in subject formation.
{"title":"David Copperfield, Émile, and the Legacy of Enlightenment Education Literature","authors":"Benjamin D. O'Dell, James Armstrong, Kathryne Ford, Lanya Lamouria, J. Parrott, D. Rainsford, T. Wagner, Robert Sirabian, M. Allen-Emerson","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0000","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Bildungsroman is a genre concerned with the construction of the individual's relationship with society. Critics have often associated Victorian Bildungsromane with the loss of agency as ideological forces funnel literary characters (and, by extension, their readers) through a series of conventional plot points designed to reinforce a fairly conservative set of middle-class values. This essay complicates such readings by pairing Charles Dickens's paradigmatic Victorian Bildungsroman David Copperfield (1850) with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's progenitor to the genre, Émile (1762). I suggest that setting Dickens's novel against the more philosophically dense and overtly confrontational Émile highlights David Copperfield's vexed relationship with established social codes, supplying the foundation for an important reconsideration of the Bildungsroman's role in subject formation.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"107 - 108 - 112 - 112 - 116 - 116 - 121 - 127 - 130 - 27 - 28 - 3 - 4 - 44 - 45 - 5 - 63 - 64 - 7 -"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42006924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This article explores how Charles Dickens's failed romance with Maria Beadnell–which drove him to burn his early autobiographical attempt–haunts his fictional life-writing novel David Copperfield. Maria's rejection intensified Dickens's previous traumas of the blacking warehouse and his father's imprisonment–subsequently producing a type of Freudian split self that I term the Dickensian hero/protagonist split. David is the novel's protagonist, but Agnes is its hero/ine. These divisions underscore Dickens's overarching preoccupations with legacy, and his notoriously fraught relationship with the life-writing genre. Agnes may not be a figure modern readers can admire; however, her position as hero/ine in David Copperfield's history nonetheless illuminates Dickens's own traumas, manifested in David's insecurities about heroism and narrative legacy.
{"title":"Dickensian Divisions: David Copperfield's \"Hero[ine] of my own life\"","authors":"Kathryne Ford","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article explores how Charles Dickens's failed romance with Maria Beadnell–which drove him to burn his early autobiographical attempt–haunts his fictional life-writing novel David Copperfield. Maria's rejection intensified Dickens's previous traumas of the blacking warehouse and his father's imprisonment–subsequently producing a type of Freudian split self that I term the Dickensian hero/protagonist split. David is the novel's protagonist, but Agnes is its hero/ine. These divisions underscore Dickens's overarching preoccupations with legacy, and his notoriously fraught relationship with the life-writing genre. Agnes may not be a figure modern readers can admire; however, her position as hero/ine in David Copperfield's history nonetheless illuminates Dickens's own traumas, manifested in David's insecurities about heroism and narrative legacy.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"45 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47930422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough (review)","authors":"M. Allen-Emerson","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"112 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48714060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson (review)","authors":"T. Wagner","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0006","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"116 - 121"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49292320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:The evolution in spring 1849 of Dickens's new eponym is traced, showing that the link between "Mag" (as "halfpenny") and "Copperfield" is not merely metallic but electrical. The forename "David" is also interrogated, revealing Humphry Davy as a major inspiration, and Robert Hunt's 1848 work The Poetry of Science as Dickens's immediate source for his knowledge of recent scientific advances. The researches of both Davy and Michael Faraday are also shown to lie behind the newly-coined name "Copperfield." The discussion moves on to reveal how the name "Uriah Heep" encodes a number of key significations that link the character to David Copperfield and contemporary scientific developments in previously unsuspected ways, as well as to the electrically-sparked monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
{"title":"Electrical Undercurrents in David Copperfield","authors":"J. Parrott","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The evolution in spring 1849 of Dickens's new eponym is traced, showing that the link between \"Mag\" (as \"halfpenny\") and \"Copperfield\" is not merely metallic but electrical. The forename \"David\" is also interrogated, revealing Humphry Davy as a major inspiration, and Robert Hunt's 1848 work The Poetry of Science as Dickens's immediate source for his knowledge of recent scientific advances. The researches of both Davy and Michael Faraday are also shown to lie behind the newly-coined name \"Copperfield.\" The discussion moves on to reveal how the name \"Uriah Heep\" encodes a number of key significations that link the character to David Copperfield and contemporary scientific developments in previously unsuspected ways, as well as to the electrically-sparked monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"107 - 83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43055060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Victorians like Charles Dickens both lauded the Romantic poets as heroes and deplored them for their loose morals. No figure caused more consternation for the Victorians than Lord Byron, a figure Dickens reimagined as James Steerforth in his novel David Copperfield. The character's tragedy re-enacts the ambivalent and highly charged relationship Victorians had with Byron, the most notorious hero–villain of the Romantic era. The ambiguous portrayal of Steerforth, constantly viewed through the worshipful eyes of David, reflects a broader coming to terms with the past that Victorian Britain sought to undertake in re-evaluating the heroic but problematic legacy of the Romantic era.
{"title":"\"In a Dark Wig\": Reinventing Byron as Steerforth in David Copperfield","authors":"James Armstrong","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Victorians like Charles Dickens both lauded the Romantic poets as heroes and deplored them for their loose morals. No figure caused more consternation for the Victorians than Lord Byron, a figure Dickens reimagined as James Steerforth in his novel David Copperfield. The character's tragedy re-enacts the ambivalent and highly charged relationship Victorians had with Byron, the most notorious hero–villain of the Romantic era. The ambiguous portrayal of Steerforth, constantly viewed through the worshipful eyes of David, reflects a broader coming to terms with the past that Victorian Britain sought to undertake in re-evaluating the heroic but problematic legacy of the Romantic era.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"28 - 44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45905390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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