狄更斯和他的公众

IF 0.7 1区 文学 0 LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES DICKENS QUARTERLY Pub Date : 2024-02-23 DOI:10.1353/dqt.2024.a920199
Michelle Allen-Emerson, Annette Federico
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Dickens “could measure the reading public, – probably taking his measure of it unconsciously, – and knew what the public wanted of him.” Such an intuitive connection with masses of people is so rare that “no critic is justified in putting aside the consideration of that circumstance” (Collins 322–25). Two years later, after the publication of John Forster’s biography of Dickens and as reassessments of the novels started to heat up, George Henry Lewes also recognized that readers’ affection for Dickens’s work made him a difficult case for the literary critic whose job is to form judgments, or, in Lewes’s phrase, “to pronounce absolute verdicts” on aesthetic grounds (142). That is not the right way to go about it with Dickens. Those critics who tried to find reasons for their objections to Dickens’s art, wrote Lewes, simply “failed to recognise the supreme powers which ensured his triumph in spite of all defects” (154).</p> <p>We latter-day critics (and readers of <em>Dickens Quarterly</em>) have been trying to define and describe, nail down and spell out, the nature of Dickens’s “supreme powers” – we almost wrote his superpowers! – in our professional discourse for a century and a quarter, in almost 800 academic books and close to 5,000 scholarly articles in many languages. That seems like a lot of ink, a lot of research, a lot of argumentation. But these numbers do not come close to conveying the reach of Dickens’s appeal to readers whose writing and thinking about Dickens does not get listed in academic databases – books for the educated general public, such as John Mullan’s <em>The Artful Dickens</em> or Lee Jackson’s <em>Dickensland</em> (to name two recent ones), books for children and young adults, literary companions for readers getting started with Dickens, memoirs and recollections, books in cultural studies (such as Nick Hornby’s <em>Dickens and Prince</em>), illustrated books, coffee table books <strong>[End Page 6]</strong> (Hillary Macaskill’s <em>Charles Dickens at Home</em>), celebrations (Simon Callow’s books), histories and retellings (Les Standiford’s <em>The Man Who Invented Christmas</em>), and adaptations of the novels in all media. As Zadie Smith remarked recently in an essay in <em>The New Yorker</em>, it seems as if Dickens is everywhere, “like weather.”</p> <p>Indeed, Dickens is more ubiquitous outside of academia than he is inside – and we cannot think of many canonical writers you can say that about in the twenty-first century. Dickens has so <em>many</em> publics today that trying to keep him safe within the precincts of “scholarly expertise” is neither possible nor, as we hope this special issue of <em>DQ</em> will show, altogether desirable, at least not all of the time. Moreover, it is our contention that scholarship too can benefit from reckoning with the role Dickens plays in our off-duty, non-professional lives as parents, partners, students, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Opening the pages of the journal to different styles of critical writing – memoir, storytelling, dialogue – could be a small step toward refreshing conversations about Dickens’s importance and persistence, our difficulties with him, his enticements, and the many claims he makes on us as readers at this particular time.</p> <p>The idea for this special issue came to us on the final day of the Dickens Society Symposium on “Dickens and His Publics,” hosted by City, University of London in the summer of 2022. Lifting a pint at the end of a guided Dickens Walking Tour, a handful of symposium participants discussed the papers we heard at the conference, our teaching jobs, our plans after we left London. 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Dickens “could measure the reading public, – probably taking his measure of it unconsciously, – and knew what the public wanted of him.” Such an intuitive connection with masses of people is so rare that “no critic is justified in putting aside the consideration of that circumstance” (Collins 322–25). Two years later, after the publication of John Forster’s biography of Dickens and as reassessments of the novels started to heat up, George Henry Lewes also recognized that readers’ affection for Dickens’s work made him a difficult case for the literary critic whose job is to form judgments, or, in Lewes’s phrase, “to pronounce absolute verdicts” on aesthetic grounds (142). That is not the right way to go about it with Dickens. Those critics who tried to find reasons for their objections to Dickens’s art, wrote Lewes, simply “failed to recognise the supreme powers which ensured his triumph in spite of all defects” (154).</p> <p>We latter-day critics (and readers of <em>Dickens Quarterly</em>) have been trying to define and describe, nail down and spell out, the nature of Dickens’s “supreme powers” – we almost wrote his superpowers! – in our professional discourse for a century and a quarter, in almost 800 academic books and close to 5,000 scholarly articles in many languages. That seems like a lot of ink, a lot of research, a lot of argumentation. 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引用次数: 0

摘要

以下是内容的简要摘录,以代替摘要: 狄更斯和他的公众 米歇尔-艾伦-埃默森(简历)和安妮特-费德里科(简历 当查尔斯-狄更斯于 1870 年 6 月 7 日去世时,汹涌的公众情绪几乎淹没了维多利亚时代文学评论家和评论家们有节制的评判:正如安东尼-特罗洛普(Anthony Trollope)所说,这不是进行 "精确批评 "的时刻。"特罗洛普承认:"如果谴责一部充满艺术魅力的作品缺乏艺术性,那是愚蠢的。狄更斯 "能够衡量阅读大众--可能是在无意识中衡量的--并且知道大众对他的要求"。这种与大众的直觉联系是如此罕见,以至于 "任何评论家都没有理由将这种情况搁置一边"(柯林斯 322-25)。两年后,在约翰-福斯特的《狄更斯传》出版后,随着对狄更斯小说的重新评价开始升温,乔治-亨利-卢斯也认识到,读者对狄更斯作品的喜爱使他成为文学评论家的一个难题,而文学评论家的工作就是形成判断,或者用卢斯的话说,根据审美理由 "宣布绝对的裁决"(142)。对于狄更斯,这样做是不对的。卢斯写道,那些试图为自己反对狄更斯的艺术寻找理由的批评家,只是 "没有认识到确保他克服一切缺陷取得胜利的最高力量"(154)。我们这些后世的评论家(以及《狄更斯季刊》的读者)一直在试图定义和描述、确定和阐明狄更斯的 "最高力量"--我们几乎可以写成他的超能力--的性质!- 在我们的专业论述中,在近 800 本学术著作和近 5,000 篇多种语言的学术论文中,我们已经尝试定义和描述狄更斯 "至高无上的力量"--我们几乎把他写成了 "超能力!"--的性质长达一个季度。这似乎是大量的笔墨、大量的研究、大量的论证。但这些数字还不足以表达狄更斯对读者的吸引力有多大,这些读者对狄更斯的写作和思考并没有被列入学术数据库--面向受过教育的普通大众的书籍,如约翰-穆兰(John Mullan)的《艺术的狄更斯》(The Artful Dickens)或李-杰克逊(Lee Jackson)的《狄更斯乐园》(Dickensland)(仅列举最近出版的两本书),面向儿童和青少年的书籍,面向开始接触狄更斯的读者的文学伴侣、回忆录和回忆录、文化研究类图书(如尼克-霍恩比的《狄更斯与王子》)、图文并茂的图书、咖啡桌图书 [End Page 6](希拉里-马卡斯基尔的《查尔斯-狄更斯在家中》)、庆祝活动(西蒙-卡洛的图书)、历史和重述(莱斯-斯坦迪福德的《发明圣诞节的人》),以及各种媒体对小说的改编。正如扎迪-史密斯(Zadie Smith)最近在《纽约客》上发表的一篇文章中所说,狄更斯似乎无处不在,"就像天气一样"。事实上,狄更斯在学术界外比在学术界内更无处不在--在 21 世纪,我们想不出有多少经典作家可以这样说。今天,狄更斯拥有如此众多的公众,试图将他牢牢禁锢在 "学术专长 "的范围内既不可能,也不可取,正如我们希望本期《DQ》特刊所展示的那样,至少不是一直如此。此外,我们认为,在我们下班后的非专业生活中,狄更斯作为父母、伴侣、学生、朋友、教师和同事所扮演的角色,也会让学术研究受益匪浅。在本刊上发表不同风格的评论性文章--回忆录、讲故事、对话--可能是朝着刷新关于狄更斯的重要性和持续性、我们与他之间的困难、他的诱惑以及他在这个特殊时期对我们这些读者的诸多要求的对话迈出的一小步。2022 年夏天,在伦敦城市大学主办的狄更斯学会 "狄更斯及其公众 "研讨会的最后一天,我们萌生了出版这期特刊的想法。在狄更斯漫步之旅结束后,几位研讨会与会者举起一品脱,讨论了我们在会议上听到的论文、我们的教学工作以及我们离开伦敦后的计划。如今,一年多过去了,酒馆里的那一个小时仿佛是一个神奇的中场休息,一个精明的会议参加者和专业学者放松地融入平凡生活的时刻......
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Dickens and His Publics
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Dickens and His Publics
  • Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) and Annette Federico (bio)

When Charles Dickens died on 7 June 1870, the outpouring of public feeling all but drowned out the tempered judgements of Victorian literary critics and reviewers: it was not the moment for “exact criticism,” as Anthony Trollope put it. “It is fatuous to condemn that as deficient in art which has been so full of art as to captivate all men,” Trollope conceded. Dickens “could measure the reading public, – probably taking his measure of it unconsciously, – and knew what the public wanted of him.” Such an intuitive connection with masses of people is so rare that “no critic is justified in putting aside the consideration of that circumstance” (Collins 322–25). Two years later, after the publication of John Forster’s biography of Dickens and as reassessments of the novels started to heat up, George Henry Lewes also recognized that readers’ affection for Dickens’s work made him a difficult case for the literary critic whose job is to form judgments, or, in Lewes’s phrase, “to pronounce absolute verdicts” on aesthetic grounds (142). That is not the right way to go about it with Dickens. Those critics who tried to find reasons for their objections to Dickens’s art, wrote Lewes, simply “failed to recognise the supreme powers which ensured his triumph in spite of all defects” (154).

We latter-day critics (and readers of Dickens Quarterly) have been trying to define and describe, nail down and spell out, the nature of Dickens’s “supreme powers” – we almost wrote his superpowers! – in our professional discourse for a century and a quarter, in almost 800 academic books and close to 5,000 scholarly articles in many languages. That seems like a lot of ink, a lot of research, a lot of argumentation. But these numbers do not come close to conveying the reach of Dickens’s appeal to readers whose writing and thinking about Dickens does not get listed in academic databases – books for the educated general public, such as John Mullan’s The Artful Dickens or Lee Jackson’s Dickensland (to name two recent ones), books for children and young adults, literary companions for readers getting started with Dickens, memoirs and recollections, books in cultural studies (such as Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince), illustrated books, coffee table books [End Page 6] (Hillary Macaskill’s Charles Dickens at Home), celebrations (Simon Callow’s books), histories and retellings (Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas), and adaptations of the novels in all media. As Zadie Smith remarked recently in an essay in The New Yorker, it seems as if Dickens is everywhere, “like weather.”

Indeed, Dickens is more ubiquitous outside of academia than he is inside – and we cannot think of many canonical writers you can say that about in the twenty-first century. Dickens has so many publics today that trying to keep him safe within the precincts of “scholarly expertise” is neither possible nor, as we hope this special issue of DQ will show, altogether desirable, at least not all of the time. Moreover, it is our contention that scholarship too can benefit from reckoning with the role Dickens plays in our off-duty, non-professional lives as parents, partners, students, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Opening the pages of the journal to different styles of critical writing – memoir, storytelling, dialogue – could be a small step toward refreshing conversations about Dickens’s importance and persistence, our difficulties with him, his enticements, and the many claims he makes on us as readers at this particular time.

The idea for this special issue came to us on the final day of the Dickens Society Symposium on “Dickens and His Publics,” hosted by City, University of London in the summer of 2022. Lifting a pint at the end of a guided Dickens Walking Tour, a handful of symposium participants discussed the papers we heard at the conference, our teaching jobs, our plans after we left London. Now, after more than a year has passed, that hour in the pub seems like a magical intermission, a moment when the smart conference-goer and professional scholar relaxed into the ordinary...

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来源期刊
DICKENS QUARTERLY
DICKENS QUARTERLY LITERATURE, BRITISH ISLES-
CiteScore
0.20
自引率
16.70%
发文量
33
期刊最新文献
Dickens's Mudfog Charles Dickens and Georgina Hogarth: A Curious and Enduring Relationship by Christine Skelton (review) Writing to Control the Narrative: Charles Dickens, PTSD, and the Staplehurst Rail Crash The Year that Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 by Michael Wheeler (review) The Dickens Checklist
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