Dickens and the Noble Savage

Abstract:Avoiding the easier options of ahistorical condemnation or contextual defense, this paper looks at "The Nobel Savage," and argues that Dickens attempts to negotiate a balance between the then-prevalent discourses on culture and civilization, and takes an occasional tumble in the process. What makes the essay significant today is not Dickens's colonial positions on the 'savages,' including their purported ethnography, or his socially progressive position on matters like the eradication of tyranny in Europe. Instead, what is significant is the way in which Dickens struggles against "an enormous superstition," which is one of the discourses he wishes to utter, but then, given the pressure of the discourses that utter him, he falls into errors that seem almost inevitable for a person of his time and place and almost monstrous to us today. The paper, then, looks at the great writer not just as one who writes in language, but also as one who is written by language in that very process.