Dickens Quarterly 

About: Dickens Quarterly is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Computer science & Narrative. It has an ISSN identifier of 0742-5473. Over the lifetime, 280 publications have been published receiving 506 citations.

"The Age of Veneer": Charles Dickens and the antinomies of Victorian consumer culture

Abstract: he bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012 was celebrated in myriad ways across the English-speaking world and beyond. Building on the long-standing tradition of heritage appropriations of his work, the "Dickens industry" made full use of the commercial opportunities: in Britain, a major new biography was serialised on Radio 4, while reworkings of Dickens's novels were an almost omnipresent feature on television (John 240-89). A dominant motif of this outpouring was Dickens's "humanitarianism," especially his sympathy for the poor and his injunctions to the rich on the duty of Christian charity. Surprisingly, given the ongoing economic crisis, Dickens's attitude towards material greed went largely unremarked despite the fact that Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel published in 1865, unreservedly damned the rich for their conspicuous consumption practices. His critique of the Veneerings and their circle and, by extension, the trajectory of British society in the "age of capital," is all the more remarkable when we remember that Dickens was far from being a radical himself; he had embraced free trade in the mid 1840s and although he had conflicting feelings about capitalist modernity, Dickens had little time for attempts by either working-class Chartists or paternalistic Tories to regulate industrial "progress" (Slater).

From Caricature to Character: The Intellectually Disabled in Dickens's Novels (Part 1)

Abstract: Yet the reliance upon disability in narrative rarely develops into a means of identifying people with disabilities as a disenfranchised cultural constituency. The ascription of absolute singularity to disability performs a contradictory operation: a character 'stands out' as a result of an attributed blemish, but this exceptionality divorces him or her from a shared social identity. (Narrative Prosthesis 55) ********** David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's primary plaint in Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (2000) is that Victorian and early modern literatures habitually spin disability into a spectacle, into a flashing sign or symbol meant to attract attention to something other than itself. Fictional disability often functions as a crutch or prosthesis upon which characterization, plot, theme, and tone may lean, little attention being drawn to the larger disabled population represented by the single, imaginary example. The physically disabled character's very distinctiveness can lead, not only to isolation from those other fictional persons who react with distancing pity or disgust, but to a kind of representational disconnect from those real-world individuals with disabilities whose numbers--recognized within the boundary of the novel or short story--would strip the character's exceptional disability of its rhetorical power. Mitchell and Snyder suggest that Victorian literature is highly dependent upon such "static languages," that it predicates itself on predictably "sterile" and delimiting formulae of narrative-making (142). The question of whether this generalization can be justly applied to the work of one of Victorian England's most prolific writers serves as the governing impetus for this essay. Charles Dickens seems an intuitive choice for literary defender of the intellectually disabled, a manifestly humanitarian author likely to carve out in his fiction that welcoming, inclusive space so wanting in a Victorian milieu increasingly preoccupied with education, industry, and self-reliance. Dickens's first three novels bespeak a ready advocate for victims of many kinds of social injustice. The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), Oliver Twist (1837-9), and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) together establish what will become life-long, very loud sympathies for the destitute, the orphaned, the poorly educated, and the imprisoned debtor. Like his friend and collaborator Wilkie Collins, Dickens also manifests an enduring interest in the physically disabled, especially those whose vision impairment, faulty hearing, mobility difficulties, or visible disfigurement are compounded by class inequities and poverty. Intellectually disabled characters provide an even more severe indictment of Dickens's society: the author ties the origins of figures like Smike, Mr. Dick, and Maggy right back to contemporary medical, educational, and social problems. And yet, while Dickens often appears sympathetic to the plight of these various groups, his body of work complicates any attempt to cast him as a consistent progressive. As Peter Akroyd notes in his biography of Dickens, the novelist "was a radical by instinct rather than by ideology," a disjunction that results in curiously disparate approaches to the same oppressed populations as one moves from novel to novel (137). Dickens's representations of the intellectually deficient are, like his renderings of the physically disabled, tonally complex and, occasionally, ethically suspect. Only gradually does the maturing author move from old stereotypes that operate in traditionally limiting--often internally inconsistent--ways, towards more stable and three-dimensional configurations of the idiot and imbecile. Notably, as these disabled figures grow more nuanced and less bound to one-dimensional role-plays that functionally ostracize them from their peers, they also become both more peripheral to the plot and more easily absorbed into the communities of their respective novels. …

Handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity in Great Expectations

Abstract: I Pip arrives in London a blacksmith by training but a gentleman by anonymous financial assistance, and this social contradiction creates a crisis in naming. A proper gentleman can not be called a vulgar name like "Pip" and, as Herbert Pocket points out, Pip's Christian name "Philip," does not fit him at all. Responding to this dilemma with a sense of tact bordering on genius, (1) Herbert resolves to call Pip "Handel"--for the composer's Harpsichord Suite No. 5 in E Major, more commonly known as the "Harmonious Blacksmith." The brilliance of the name, of course, comes from the way it forges unlikely continuities between physical, imaginative, and even emotional labor in Great Expectations. But beyond this, the name "Handel" also participates in a surging popular discourse about hands at mid century--both inside and outside the text; a surge that makes this particular body part crucial to understanding the interconnectedness between "nature" and "culture" that this novel so adeptly probes. On 9 September 1848, Punch Magazine responded to this new wave of interest in the hand with a comical entry entitled "Handy Phrenology" [see figure overleaf ). The piece satirizes the Victorian penchant for reading the legibility of character in the materiality of the body with a characteristically playful flair (2): We dare say that the hand of WERTHER will be distinguished by its Werts; and we can imagine that the wrist will be found fully developed in A-WRISTOTLE, A-WRISTIDES, and the rest of the a-wristocracy of genius that the world has contained. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] As is the case so often with Punch, however, its blunt humor exposes significant cultural preoccupations. The wide commercial success of more "serious" texts such as The Psychonomy of the Hand (Beamish 1843) and The Hand Phrenologically Considered (Anon. 1848) reflected the enthusiasm with which mid-century readers came to associate the material features of the body with the social components of identity. Since very few novelists rely more heavily on the material aspects of characterization than Charles Dickens, it should come as no surprise that it is the hands of many Dickensian characters that extend their general dispositions: Fagin's dirty fingernails, Miss Pecksniff's lily hand, Stephen Blackpool's steady grasp, and Uriah Heep's sweaty palms represent just a few notable instances. By the 1850s these attributes came to reflect the specificity found in popular pseudoscientific texts. Dickens's conception of Thomas Gradgrind's "squarely pointing square forefinger" in Hard Times (1854), for example, draws on contemporary anatomical discourse which maintained that "the square form on the ends of the fingers [was] the index of precedent, custom, and routine" (The Psychonomy of the Hand 8). But over and above this general attention to the appendages of his characters, I am suggetsing that Dickens's 1860-61 novel Great Expectations is in a category all its own. The sheer number of hand-related references in Great Expectations (1860-61) makes the topic difficult to miss. There are more than 450 allusions to the word "hand" alone, with many of them appearing regularly in the text's tragi-comedic undercurrent. Mrs. Joe rears her brother "by hand" (12); Pumblechook wants his nephew "bound out of hand" (84); Jaggers bites "his great forefinger" and throws his exceedingly "large hand" at his opponents (106); Miss Havisham follows her imperious commands with "an impatient movement of her right hand" (51); Estella wields a "taunting hand" and Joe a "great good hand" (55, 349). I grant that by culling these examples in this way, I am abstracting them from the flow of the narrative. That, however, is just the point. I maintain that in Great Expectations Dickens's "hands" are not merely extensions of personality; they function as starkly visible but barely noticeable features at the core of the novel's identity politics. …

Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew Beaumont (review)

Abstract: Vol. 32, No. 4, December 2015 are named); there is also a helpful selection of quotations from contemporary reviews. The prodigious research evident throughout this remarkable book will make it an enormously useful resource, and fortunately it is also acutely intelligent and often humorous: the program for the world première of the Lean film contained an advert for Lux soap endorsed by Valerie Hobson and for a Goya fragrance dedicated to her, while the 1950 NBC Theatre version offered listeners the chance to win an Encyclopaedia Britannica.