Dickens and the Historical Imagination

Abstract:This article examines Dickens's fascination with old buildings, places and objects. Dickens himself suggests that these relics of antiquity serve as stimulus and scaffold for a triad of memory, imagination and story-telling and repeatedly refers to the "mystery" inherent in old buildings, which I link to the Romantic idea of the suggestive power of ruins. Dickens, admittedly, frequently satirizes those who fetishize/romanticize the past, which might appear at odds with his own interest in material antiquity. This satirical approach, however, amounts to Dickens reflecting on his own practice and indirectly laying claim to a historical "new picturesque"–a purposeful, moral use of the past, superior to that of his literary rivals. I illustrate this by comparing The Old Curiosity Shop with the contemporaneous The Tower of London by W. H. Ainsworth. I conclude by arguing that Dickens is also highly conscious of the debt which his animation of the inanimate owes to acts of historical imagination, something he subtly acknowledges in "Meditations in Monmouth Street."