Showing papers in "Dickens Quarterly in 2011"

Charles Dickens and the Vertigo of the List: A Few Proposals

Abstract: The recent publication of Umberto Eco's Vertignine della Lista opens some fresh opportunities for reading Dickens. Focusing on how lists are made to include or exclude, Eco extends his interests to their function and meaning within contexts that embrace the visual and the verbal, ranging from the Wunderkammer genre paintings in Zoffany's style to the manifold lists enclosed in novels and poems belonging to the Western tradition. To an extent, the book reads almost like an anthology of selected passages. Numerous illustrations, each carefully introduced, provide several examples of lists classified according to their object, function, structure and philosophical meaning. Among them, one finds the famous opening paragraphs of Bleak House--the only "list" from Dickens's works included--discussed because it fits into the category of lists containing references to places. I take this tribute to Dickens by a noted Italian scholar as both a sign of Dickens's continuing appeal and as an invitation to explore how Eco's ideas might be extended. As readers are aware, there is more than one list to be found in Dickens's works, where they frequently serve as a rhetorical device that also forms one of the hallmarks of his personal, idiosyncratic style. My notes, therefore, while acknowledging Eco's inclusion of the opening paragraphs of Bleak House among notable lists, will explore how the device works more generally with reference to other lists present in Dickens's works. Actually, before Eco, the device did not go unheeded: it belonged to the classical realm of rhetoric, where it appeared under the name of enumeratio, (1) and it served traditionally to impose a kind of order and structure upon a series of items; this same device could occasionally develop into an accumulatio, or chaotic accumulation. Whereas enumeration tends to be orderly and even structured, accumulation can lack both attributes and even contribute to weakening traditional genres by blending or contaminating the lyrical with the ironic, the tragic and the ordinary. The first is didactic, the latter is comic: and the effects a writer can draw from them are obvious. Eco, however, rather than providing definitions, starts with a single focus on different types of lists. His survey begins with Homer's description in the Iliad (Book XVIII, lines 478-608) of Achilles' shield. He remarks that the list (and description) of different landscapes engraved on the shield is encompassed by its circular form. In this case, Eco argues, the inventory is an "epiphany of form," a "mise-en-forme" which suggests that inside the blue watery ring of the great river Oceanus circumscribing the space represented within the shield, there is a universal model of society, altogether contained and finished, therefore known and describable. But what happens when both boundaries and what they may contain--objects, numbers and curiously unfamiliar items of dubious classification, such as mirabilia--are unknown entities? In this case the catalogue becomes endless, infinite, and it partakes of the quality of the numerical sublime. Within this kind of list, objects can only be described according to the proprieties which allow their inclusion: the roll call of items does not strive towards an impossible all- containing form, but it depends on uncountability and upon an imprecisely defined image of the universe. Some scholars, Eco observes, have remarked that this type of catalogue where objects are named at random, without order or hierarchy, is typical not only of primitive societies, but also of the Baroque and the postmodern condition, the epistemological horizon of postmodernity has indeed been described as a panorama crowded by competing discourses (Lyotard), leaving it to readers themselves to decide among particulars which constitute true contributions to knowledge. With this kind of list, closure of form remains impossible despite the author's attempt to provide complete coverage. …

Bringing Newness to the World: Lloyd Jones's "Pacific Version of Great Expectations"

Abstract: Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones's acclaimed novel (1) takes its name from the narrator of Great Expectations. This was the first Dickens book JL J JL Jones read, one he encountered as a child, returned to many times, and, in his own words, as he got older and better at reading, "began to see the book in a slightly different light. (2)" Subsequently as a novelist himself, he paid homage to it by using Great Expectations as a founding text for Mister Pip, engaging in a dialogue with it as a text which has "entered his DNA. (3)" Rewriting classics, a postmodernist trend, implies various phenomena of transposition, transformation and hybridization. Jones transposes his predecessor's Victorian novel to a completely different cultural context, that is to say twentieth-century Bougainville where the native pupils listen to their teacher's daily reading of Great Expectations in class and begin to identify with Pip, the white Victorian character. Later on in the unfolding of the novel, native elements are grafted on Dickens's original story by their teacher, the Scheherazade-like Mr. Watts, who, while telling the rebels his life story, his "Pacific version of Great Expectations" fuses native and nonnative, literary and oral, personal and mythological tales. The combination of stories and the "contamination" of the hypotext (4) is a vital process for this character who must continue at all costs to deliver new episodes every night to his curious and blood-thirsty audience. In the same way, contemporary authors continuously draw from old stories to revive and update them: this also constitutes a vital literary practice which is extremely valuable for successive generations of readers, who are thus exposed to oeuvres belonging to our literary pantheon. Original texts are constantly rewritten and modernized to incorporate other experiences, literary traditions and cultural perspectives. I would like to examine the literary implications of Lloyd Jones's playing with and manipulating a Western canonical hypotext, Great Expectations, in order to create original hypertexts which are subtly interwoven in his novel, as well as the political and cultural context to which these hypertexts are anchored. Questions about the role of the Western work in a native environment, its dramatic but also salutary impact on the inhabitants, the "purity" of the canonical text and the power of literature in general will also be addressed. Mister Pip takes place in Bougainville, an island in Papua New Guinea, in the wake of Francis Ona's rebel uprising and the blockade declared by the government of Papua New Guinea in 1990. (5) Soldiers from Port Moreseby (the redskins) are sent by the government to lay siege to the island to try to bring order so that mining can resume. The first-person narrator Matilda recounts her story over a span of several years--the passage of time marked at first by the reading of instalments from Great Expectations and horrific events which happen in the inhabitants' lives--before and after arriving in Townsville, Australia, to live with her father and become a Dickens scholar. The adult Matilda is looking back to events that began when she was thirteen, and tells not only her story, but also that of her family and people, and that of Mr. Watts, her teacher (his other names, nicknames and facets will be unveiled as Matilda's memoir unfolds: Pop Eye, Mister Dickens, Mister Pip, Tom (6)), which became intrinsically linked with theirs. The political conflict is explained by Matilda in terms of color. The colorfully complex political landscape is divided between the islanders and the soldiers from Port Moresby: "According to Port Moresby we are one country. According to us we are black as the night. The soldiers looked like people leached up out of the red earth. That's why they were known as redskins" (7-8). The world considers Bougainville as part of Papua New Guinea, but the residents of the island, much darker, distinguish themselves from the "redskins" across the water. …

Dickensian Resonances in the Contemporary English Novel

Abstract: Victoriana The commanding presence of Dickens in contemporary English and Anglophone fiction, together with other Victorian authors, is now an acknowledged fact . So, a good question to begin with could be: why this interest in the Victorian Age and literature, and in Dickens in particular? Let me suggest a few answers as an introduction to my topic. Attention to the Victorian Age developed steadily throughout the twentieth century, passing through various phases until it reached a tipping point in the 1950s when a serious revaluation began, initiated in the United States (1) and then in England as Victorian studies took their place in the university curriculum. It is against this cultural background that the phenomenon of nostalgia for, and critique of, Victorian history and literature situates itself, and that the politics of "Victoriana" emerges. Cora Kaplan deals with this phenomenon in the introduction to her book Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007). She begins by mentioning Brian Moore's comic novel The Great Victorian Collection (1975), whose protagonist, a Canadian assistant professor of British history researching Victorian things, dreams that he is walking through an exhibit of Victorian objects reproducing those on display in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Kaplan defines this novel as "a meditation on the modern obsession with things Victorian" (1), "a surreal metacommentary on the impossible desire to possess the Victorian past" (88), to "own" it through its remains: "the physical and written forms that are its material history" (1). It is well known that, since the late 1960s, starting with Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) and John Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), a considerable number of historical novels (also film and television adaptations) have appeared which feature the Victorian period and adopt narrative conventions inscribed within the more general postmodern modality of revisiting the past in the form of sequels, parodies and pastiches. Concerning this, John Kucich and Diane SadofF remark that, in spite of the abundant critical material on postmodernism, and of studies touching on postmodern returns to Victorian texts, "there has been very little scholarly work that has attempted to historicise postmodern rewritings of Victorian culture." Kucich and Sadoff address this gap with the intention of beginning "a discussion of postmodernism's privileging of the Victorian as its historical 'other'" (x-xi). A variety of factors account for this resurgence of interest, they assert, including the emergence of cultural studies, new historicism, interest in narrative that evokes nostalgia for nineteenth-century aesthetic forms, "the rise of women into positions of cultural authority as both producers and consumers," and the related discourses of gender and postcolonial theory. All of them combined, they conclude, constitute a network of overdeterminations that privileges the Victorian period as the site of historical emergence through which postmodernism attempts to think its own cultural identity (xxv-vi). (2) This phenomenon has been variously interpreted. Robin Gilmour, for example, refers to the publishing industry with its links to the expansion of British higher education and the study of Victorian literature and history, which has led to the growth of the paperback market in Victorian fiction. Interest in nineteenth-century novels, he suggests, reflects "certain powerful narrative simplicities" such as the pleasure of the plot, Romance and romantic love (198). To which I would add the appeal of characterization, the presence of an (often) opinionated omniscient narrator, and various ingredients, including sex, a point made by Cora Kaplan (86). But the literary phenomenon of neo-Victorianism, I suggest, is also connected to opportunities the period offers today's novelists. Gilmour usefully characterizes these as follows: the historical novel written from a modern perspective (J. …

Little Dorrit: The Readers within the Text

Abstract: Part I: the Iron Box In Little Dorrit Dickens teased his contemporary readers for a year and a half with hints that the Clennam family had a dark secret, and that it might have some connection with the Dorrit family's financial misfortunes. Published in twenty monthly parts from December 1855 to June 1857, Little Dorrit is a protracted experiment in withholding its own secrets, as Arthur Clennam tries to discover why his father was so anxious on his deathbed, why he tried to write someone a message, and speculates about a possible connection between these mysteries and Little Dorrit. Eventually we learn that Mrs. Clennam is not Arthur's mother. The novel's back story, about events forty years ago, features bigamy and illegitimacy, a vindictive revenge, and even the connection with the Dorrits that Arthur has imagined --a story so complex that Dickens added a clarifying memorandum "for working the story round.--Retrospective" in his working notes for the final number. "When Arthur's father (weak and irresolute) married Mrs Clennam, in accordance with his Uncle's directions, he was already married, in a false name:--or as good as married," Dickens reminded himself: The girl was An orphan. Training in music, under the patronage of Frederick [Dorrit] of the Clarionet (the Uncle being still alive) Mrs Clennam went, vindictive and with her heart full of raging hatred--I have discovered it. If you love him, give him up. Submit yourself to me--Live under my custody. Live under my eye. Never see him more. Give me that child of yours to be my child--I will breed him severely and religiously; to be rescued from the ignominy of his birth, and to be a Servant of the Lord. As for you, do penance and die As for you, the father, suffer for your child's sake--made your heir and your lawful son They yielded and consented. She was placed under the care of Flintwich's brother. She dies. She had written numerous appeals to Mrs Clennam. She had implored to see her son. She had left her story. They were in the box (Stone 306-309). Gilbert Clennam, the "Uncle" of Dickens's note, later repented of his role in all this. In a codicil to his will he left one thousand guineas to the first wife, and, by a precise but peculiar formula, the same sum to Frederick Dorrit's eldest niece, if he should have one: Little Dorrit. In her rage at her rival and anyone connected with her, Mrs. Clennam suppressed that codicil and tried to burn it, but Flintwich tricked her, and added the codicil to the contents of the iron box. Flintwich tells Mrs. Clennam that he treats the box and its contents --"'mostly letters of confession to you, and Prayers for forgiveness'" as an epistolary novel: "'I kept them in a box, looking over them when I felt in the humour'" (Little Dorrit (654; bk. 2, ch. 30). Flintwich's twin brother carries this peripatetic "iron box two feet square" (675; bk. 2, ch. 33) from Mrs. Clennam's house in London to Antwerp; Rigaud/Blandois steals it and deposits it with Miss Wade in Calais; Tattycoram steals it again and takes it to Mr. Meagles, who brings it to Little Dorrit. In Little Dorrit Dickens makes a theme of his own narrative devices. Little Dorrit is about reading the story that Little Dorrit seems to embody, and withholding the documents in the wandering box, the story of Arthur's parents and Mrs. Clennam's vindictive cruelty toward them. Part II. Arthur Clennam reads Little Dorrit Self-defined as a man without a story, Arthur Clennam senses that people around him are, if not the heroes, at least the protagonists of their own stories. He is eager to read or hear those stories, as Miss Wade seems to recognize when she chooses him as the reader of her own autobiography in manuscript, The History of a Self-Tormentor" (554-61; bk. 2, ch. 21). In Little Dorrit Dickens examines the relationship between reader and novelist, the novelist at once advancing the story and withholding information, the reader following the story installment by installment, but at the same time speculating, trying to anticipate the development of the plot, to solve the story's mysteries. …

Sally Shuttleworth. the Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900

Abstract: Sally Shuttleworth. The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840-1900. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Pp. x + 497. $65. Marah Gubar. ArtfulDodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Pp. xx + 264. Cloth $55.96; Paper $24.95. Innocence is what we associate with Victorian childhood, not so much the innocence of children, for many of them were clearly not innocent in any meaning of the word, but an ideal of innocence, a belief that childhood should be distanced from adulthood, that children should be allowed to grow in accordance with the dictates of nature and ideally in constant contact with nature. This ideal can be traced back to Rousseau and more immediately to the Romantic poets, Wordsworth preeminent among them. Dickens built on this to suggest that adults needed to keep the child in them alive, and to depict many children who had been deprived of a proper childhood. More than half a century ago, Peter Coveney, in The Image of Childhood, argued that the sentimentality towards children evident in Dickens became a debilitating weakness in later writers until by 1900, in Marie Corelli's The Boy, we reached the point of "the absolute decadence of the romantic idea of innocence" (1966 ed., 192). These two books both complicate this narrative and suggest persuasive alternatives. Shuttleworth, in an admirably inter-disciplinary analysis, links together the child in literature and the two emergent disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. Both disciplines lent heavily on literature in their attempts to understand child development. Rousseau, Wordsworth, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte in Jane Eyre and George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss provided in a very real sense the foundation texts for reading the child mind. As late as 1901, a doctor, W. B. Drummond, in The Child: His Nature and Nurture, wondered whether a poet--he had Wordsworth in mind--might not "discover traits which are hidden from the cold-blooded scrutiny of science," a sentiment which it is impossible to imagine being uttered in 2001, so dominant has become scientific authority. In the nineteenth century, as Shuttleworth shows, "Science followed literature in attempting to understand the stages of child growth" (74). It was hardly a coincidence that Dombey and Son was published in the same year, 1848, as the establishment of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology by an admirer of Dickens, Forbes Winslow. Winslow published articles that reinforced the dangers of over-pressure in schools symbolized so powerfully by Paul Dombey. But while psychiatrists like Winslow became attuned through literature to the challenges facing childhood, not least the fears, especially the "night terrors," which afflicted so many children, they also began to issue alarmist warnings about the dangers of "moral insanity" in childhood. Parents were urged to watch for the early signs, such as lying, and, hard to distinguish from it, an indulgence of the imagination and the passions. The danger of lying was that it indicated that the child perpetrator had a secret world, unknown to adults. Closely linked to it was that other secret and dangerous habit, masturbation. In the mid-nineteenth century, too many children's minds, in the view of experts, were no blank sheet, nor were they engaging in a positive way with the natural wonders of the world. On the contrary, they were germinating the seeds of problems in adulthood. In the second half of the century a division began to emerge between psychology and psychiatry. Psychologists, of whom the most eminent was James Sully, friend of R. L. Stevenson and George Meredith, encouraged children to use their imagination. The child mind was of interest not only in itself but as a clue to fundamental issues of human development, for the child, as Stevenson noted, "is not our contemporary." Did the child's growth recapitulate that of the human race? …

Trust and Conscience in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend

Abstract: Most readers presume that the case of "Jarndyce v. Jarndyce" revolves around a will, but as John Jarndyce tells Esther Summerson in chapter eight of Bleak House, the question which Chancery cannot resolve is that of "'how the trusts under [a] Will are to be administered'" [my emphasis] (118; ch. 8). The only reason that the case has come before the court responsible for administering Equity, rather than the common law courts, is that it involves not simply a will or testamentary devise, but a bequest "in trust," over which "the Court of Chancery has exclusive jurisdiction, as that court alone can enforce the trust" (Spence 19). Instead of conferring legal title to his property directly on the heirs, the testator Jarndyce appoints trustees to hold the legal title and manage the trust property on behalf of the equitable title-holders (beneficiaries). However, the trustees of the Jarndyce fortune never appear in the text, and in their absence, Chancery has stepped in to act as a trustee by default in keeping with its own maxim that "Equity will not allow a trust to fail for want of a trustee." Bleak House is as much a novel about trust as it is a novel about law. "Trust" is essentially a term of morality, and like "conscience," it is "a vague but powerful concept of justice and natural law" which found a place in the lexicon of Equity (Petch 1997a, 123), the branch of law that expanded legal discourse into the broader arena of morality and casuistry. In Equity doctrine, trust refers to both an interest in property (legal or equitable) and a relationship between two persons, the trustee and the beneficiary. While at common law the beneficiary has limited remedies to ensure that the trustee holds property on behalf of the former, the principle of Equity is that it would be unconscionable for the trustee, who has undertaken to hold property for another's benefit to hold it for his personal benefit. As Lord Hardwicke stated in Ayliffe v. Murray (1740), the trust was "a burden upon the honour and conscience of the person intrusted, and [was] not [to be] undertaken upon mercenary views." (1) By focusing on the notions of honor and conscience, Lord Hardwicke related breach of trust not to illegal conduct, but to the breaking of a kind of gentleman's agreement, a contract with no binding legal force, but which Equity nevertheless recognized as binding on the conscience of the trustee. While Equity seems to align law more closely with morality, the failure of Chancery to administer the Jarndyce trusts suggests that the institutionalization of moral principles leads only to their ineffectiveness. As Kieran Dolin suggests, Bleak House creates a division between "two senses of equity, the ideal and the institutional" (Dolin 78). Despite his enmity towards "institutional" equity as represented by Chancery, Dickens remains committed "to the ideal of equity" (Dolin 80), which is represented by individuals whose behavior towards others exemplifies qualities of trust and trustworthiness. Whereas the idea of trust as property and commodity dominates in Chancery, the idea of trust as personal relationship is the dominant concern of Jarndyce in Bleak House. Unlike the Lord Chancellor, Jarndyce seeks to be a personal, not just a legal, guardian to Richard Carstone and Ada Clare. In contrast to the solicitor Vholes, he values Richard and Ada, not because of their interests in the Chancery suit, but because he wants to sever their ties with those interests. While the kindly Jarndyce is a model of benevolent guardianship, it is Esther Summerson who truly fulfils the role of trustee of Richard Carstone. The trust of Richard created by Esther and Allan centers on personal companionship, and counters not only the impersonal administrative machinery of Chancery, but also the unscrupulous, legal trusts which Vholes and Tulkinghorn use to requisition Richard's interests and Lady Dedlock's secret respectively. The lawyers subvert the fundamental nature of the trust--the exercise of power only for the benefit of others, not for mercenary reasons or personal profit. …

Charles Dickens and the Cleveland Street Workhouse

Abstract: The recent news that Dickens had lived doors from a workhouse in London's Fitzrovia went round Dickens circles like wildfire, and a goodly proportion of the signatories of the e-petition which helped save the building were Dickens aficionados. The UK government announced on March 14 2011 that the building has been given Grade II status on the Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest, so it is now protected from demolition. There is then an appeal period of 28 days, which ends on April 11. (1) Those who read their Dickens Quarterly soon after it arrives will have seen the beautiful calling card belonging to the young Mr. Dickens reproduced in the last issue. With it was a promise that a fuller account of the discovery would follow, and this article is offered in fulfillment of that undertaking. I'm primarily a historian, but of course history and literature do not have a hard-and-fast boundary, and I'm trained in both fields. My book Death Dissection and the Destitute came from a flesh reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It was during the research for that book in the 1980s, that I first came across mention of the Cleveland Street Workhouse in the fine autobiographical volume Reminiscences of a Workhouse Medical Officer, by Dr. Joseph Rogers, published posthumously in 1889. The title may not appear promising, but it says what it is, and the man's straightforwardness was what made him such a champion of poor workhouse inmates. When Rogers was working in Cleveland Street in the 1850s-60s all the workhouses of London were bursting at the seams, trying to cope with large numbers of sick poor within the mean circumstances of confined sites and a dismal penny-pinching regime. The population of sick, elderly, disabled, childbearing and dying people for whom Rogers was employed to care was equivalent to that of a major London teaching hospital, yet he had no staff, no student assistants, no trained nurses, no drugs budget, and only a single purpose-built sick ward. In 1866, 556 people were sharing 332 beds, with sick or dying in every ward. Many had to crawl to the ends of their beds to get out, as there was no room at the sides. The medicines Rogers administered to those in his care came out of his own wages. Other doctors prescribed colored and flavored water, so as to retain their earnings. Rogers campaigned to change things, and with good support from many quarters (including from Charles Dickens, as we shall see in a moment) eventually largely succeeded in bringing change, The efforts begun at Cleveland Street were finally successful in the late 1860s in forcing official recognition that sickness and infirmity were the root of much of the poverty the workhouse system had been designed to punish. New infirmaries for the sick poor were erected in the 1870s across the country. Dr. Rogers retired to a house overlooking one of the earliest of these new infirmaries, erected in Hampstead in 1869. So although Dickens did not live to see the full change, he knew it was on its way. Rogers described the old workhouse regime from the inside. He provides us with a clear, humane and uncompromising view of the mean-spirited management of a Victorian inner-city workhouse, the difficult role of the humane doctor, the suffering and the insanitary overcrowded conditions the inmates endured. It is, as far as is known, the only memoir published by a Victorian workhouse doctor. I and my husband wrote about Rogers's life's work in the British Medical Journal on the centenary of his death in 1989, and shortly thereafter we obtained an official blue plaque honoring him on his old home/apothecary's shop at 33 Dean Street, Soho. I have mentioned our article, published twenty years ago now, because it proved important both in the battle to save the workhouse, and in the discovery that Dickens had lived so closely nearby. A savvy local campaigner found it on the internet, and contacted me to see if I might help. …

Rubbing "That Wonderful Lamp Within": Reading Martin Chuzzelwit

Abstract: R. W. Buss's 1872 unfinished tribute to Dickens entitled "Dickens's Dream depicts the author sitting in his study at Gads Hill, shod in slippers and surrounded by the many creations of his imagination. (1) The scene is domestic and cozy. The author appears to be immersed in a day-dream. He is positioned in front of his bookcase but the many creatures of his fancy float around him, uncontained and unwilling to stay trapped inside the book covers. On Dickens's outstretched palm there is a small figure looking up at her sleeping creator. In "Performing Character," Malcolm Andrews interprets this famous portrait as an allegorical representation of Dickens's writing process. "Dickens's Dream," he argues, "suggests a process of creation that is akin to spontaneous generation: fictional characters are born into the world out of dreams. The author is a passive host: to reinforce this, Dickens's chair has been pushed some way back from his work-desk" (71). Surrounded by fictions he has created, Buss's Dickens seems to be at peace with himself, a day dreamer who has generated out of thin air the figures floating around him. In this essay, I will argue that this image of Dickens comes to life in the figure of Tom Pinch, who embodies the author's attempts to face the deception and duplicity at the center of Martin Chuzzlewit and eventually triumph over reality by relying on the "magic lamp" of fiction. In what follows, I shall examine how Tom Pinch, the "Aladdin" in Dickens's universe, does not get what he wished for. But what he finds in the vicarious pleasures of both fiction and "reality" may prove to be a different but not lesser kind of joy implicit in the "happy endings" of his earlier novels. Pinch never marries or raises a family of his own. But by sharing the domestic bliss of his sister Ruth and of his beloved Mary, he manages to create a Pinchian universe in which he is blessed and happy. The appearance of books and the preoccupation with reading texts and reading character signals Dickens's concern with the notion of semblances and realities. The novel's textual world is one where appearances often mislead and where schemes and deceitful fictions abound. The characters in Martin Chuzzlewit are actively involved in the construction of fictitious selves and fictional schemes. Dickens examines what being "human" and "natural" entails in a world where these notions seem to have been perverted almost beyond recognition. The novel queries the possibility of a return to a more human and humane notion of self and selfhood, one which would be "natural" rather than "artificial" or constructed. These concerns are best embodied in the figure of Tom Pinch, the naif who is depicted as the only true man in a world of deceit and artifice. Tom is described as a book lover and thus the role of reading becomes a central trope in which reading and misreading in a textual world revolve around deception and misinterpretation of both self and other. Tom Pinch is a lover of fiction, but he is also a "misreader" of the people around him, a position he maintains even after he comes to realize that his employer, the deceitful Seth Pecksniff, is in fact a manipulative and evil man. Tom gives up this "fiction" of Pecksniff as a good man, but still holds on to other fictions which help sustain his almost child like existence--a day-dream world in which those around him appear as surrogate "parents." In the figure of Tom Pinch, the most gullible and deluded character in the novel, Dickens offers us an exemplary instance of both the pleasures and the dangers of reading. Tom is presented as a quintessential book lover and avid reader of fiction, unlike Mr. Pecksniff, who only uses books for show. Tom's love of books, by contrast, is genuine, clearly evident from his response to bookshops in the scene when he first visits Salisbury. "But what were even gold and silver, precious stones and clockwork, to the bookshops, whence a pleasant smell of paper freshly pressed came issuing forth, awakening instant recollections of some new grammar had at school, long time ago, with 'Master Pinch, Grove House Academy', inscribed in faultless writing on the fly-leaf! …

Installment 33 of Great Expectations: The "Masterpiece" Chapter

Abstract: Readers of Great Expectations would probably choose one of the following as the novel's most memorable scene: Pip's graveyard encounter with Magwitch, his first attendance at Satis House, Jaggers's announcement of Pip's "great expectations" or the ex-convict's return in chapter 39, the most likely preference. Honorable mention might go to Miss Havisham's self-incineration, Pip's visit to Denmark for Wopsle's debacle as Hamlet, or either of the novel's two endings. Not so John Forster. For Dickens's friend, advisor, and official biographer, the creme de la creme was "the fifteenth chapter of the third volume" (Forster, 2: 359). We know it as chapter 54, installment 33 of 36, which appeared on 13 July 1861. In it, Pip and Magwitch attempt to escape from England by rowing down the Thames. They hope to board the steamer to Hamburg or Rotterdam. Forster divulged some of his reasons for singling out chapter 54; one can augment them to defend his choice. "At the opening of the story," he wrote: there had been an exciting scene of the wretched man's chase and recapture among the marshes, and this has its parallel at the close in his chase and recapture on the river while poor Pip is helping to get him off. To make himself sure of the actual course of a boat in such circumstances, and what possible incidents the adventure might have, Dickens hired a steamer for the day from Blackwall to Southend. Eight or nine friends and three or four members of his family were on board, and he seemed to have no care, the whole of that summer day (22na of May 1861), except to enjoy their enjoyment and entertain them with his own in the shape of a thousand whims and fancies; but his sleepless observation was at work all the time, and nothing had escaped his keen vision on either side of the river. "l-he fifteenth chapter of the third volume is a masterpiece (Forster, 2: 359). One wonders how much it cost to rent a steamer "for the day" and provide refreshments for as many as thirteen people. Unfortunately, Forster does not provide the guest list; one presumes he was among those invited. Nor is it clear if, at the time, he knew the purpose of the excursion. In retrospect, Forster marveled at Dickens's capacity to observe both sides of the river while partying with family and friends. If the Inimitable took notes, Forster did not catch him at it. It would be almost two months before chapter 54 was published. On 25 May, three days after the outing, installment 26 appeared. Herbert returns from Marseilles to learn of Magwitch's reappearance (ch. 41) and the ex-convict tells his life story in chapter 42. Three things about chapter 54 impressed Forster. First, he found the attempted escape "exciting," that is, suspenseful. Would the attempt succeed? If not, would Compeyson help to foil it? Forster also savored the "parallel" between the first "recapture" in chapter 5 and this one. It showed Dickens's structural expertise. The difference, of course, is the degree of Pip's involvement. Only a much improved Pip, who has discovered merit in the uncouth Magwitch, would take the risk of aiding and abetting an illegally returned transport. Not until the recapture, however, is Pip "poor." When Magwitch, in custody, assures Pip that "he can be a gentleman without [him]" (332; ch. 54), the latter realizes that, "being convicted, [Magwitch's] possessions would be forfeited to the Crown." Pip's fairygodfather goes broke, leaving Pip worse off than Cinderella at the start of her story. Thirdly and paramount, Forster admired a twofold verisimilitude: the escape attempt in chapter 54 was accurate topographically and chronologically. Dickens recreated "the actual course of a boat in such circumstances," calculated how long the "adventure" would take, and included no incident that was not "possible." One of several memoranda bound into the Wisbech Manuscript of Great Expectations is a sheet titled "Tide"; it contains information about the Thames's tides; Dickens relied on it to get the timing right in chapter 54. …

History Artfully Dodged? Crime, Prisons and the Legacy of "Dickens's England"

Abstract: There has been considerable interest recently among literary scholars in how Dickens's novels and journalism engage with the themes of crime, and particularly the prison. Building on earlier discussion of the subject, notably by Philip Collins, and fed by more recent theoretical input from new historical, Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian approaches, this impressive body of work is beginning to give us a clear understanding of the complex, multi-faceted discourse on crime and punishment contained in Dickens's work; and of the way in which those themes relate to broader debates on the subject among his contemporaries. A key focus of recent work in this field by scholars such as Jan Alber, Sean Grass, David Paroissien and Jeremy Tambling, is the way in which, as Alber puts it, fictional narratives "always transform and distort" the "experiential realities" of crime and incarceration in the nineteenth century (2). As Tambling reminds us in his chapter in Alber and Lauterbach's collection, Stones of Law, Bricks of Shame (2009), Dickens's fictional London draws inspiration from pre-existing literary tropes, as well as the author's reading in contemporary nonfiction and his own personal experience. The result is not only different from the Capital of today, it is also crucially different from the social reality of the London in which Dickens lived and worked (53). Making a similar point in Going Astray, Tambling comments: Dickens' descriptions of London are always narrated; the presence of the narrator is as vivid and subjective as what is represented; the realism is never neutral, so that it is not, strictly, realist ... The narrator's presence constructs each scene; the reader must note both the scene and its presentation. Seeing London doubly is characteristic of each Dickens novel.... (268; my emphasis) How to unravel this double vision, how to obtain, as it were, a stereoscopic view of Dickens's treatment of crime and the prison, is the subject of this article. It will be argued that such an approach needs to be alert both to the multi-layered complexity of the author's narrative strategies and use of fictional tropes, and also to the richness of the political, cultural and socioeconomic context in which he lived and wrote. The main focus here, to adapt slightly the title of a chapter by John Gardiner from the Blackwell Companion to Charles Dickens, will be on "History and the Uses of Dickens"; that is to say how Dickens's texts on crime and the prison have been used--often misused in fact--as sources for the social history of nineteenth-century England. I shall also consider briefly how historical evidence might be used more fruitfully to throw light on the cultural impact of Dickens's work. With few exceptions (1), historians have largely failed to contribute to an understanding of Dickens's fictional treatment of crime and the prison. This derives in part from a traditional reluctance on their part to countenance literary data at all; with many practitioners convinced, as Peter Laslett famously put it, that using such sources resembled "looking the wrong way through the telescope," (2) and as such failed to meet the requisite standards for historical evidence. In one of the earliest discussions of the subject in 1948, in an article entitled "The England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction," US historian William Aydelotte argued that "the attempt to tell the social history of a period by quotations from its novels is a kind of dilettantism which the historian would do well to avoid." Information from novels about social conditions was, he added, "highly suspect for the scholar's purposes; ... spotty, impressionistic, and inaccurate." "More conventional sources," he concluded, were "far more satisfactory" for historical research (43). The development of the "new" social history from the late 1960s brought no challenge to this view. On the contrary, the influence of the French Annales School, historical demography and Marxism all functioned to entrench a suspicion of literature, associated in the minds of many social historians with the impressionistic "Whig" social history of the early twentieth century. …

Dickens's "Gentleman for Nowhere": Reversing Technological Gothic in the Linkages of Mugby Junction

Abstract: In Mugby Junction Dickens creates and repeatedly reworks images drawn from the railroad to extend traditional Gothic motifs. As railway lines yield structural metaphors involving tracks, rails, derailing, signals, branches, stations and junctions, the eight separate tales comprising the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round are held together through a shared fictional investment in new technologies. Particularly intriguing is the way the stories explore the impact of technological change not simply on the everyday, but also on manifestations of the supernatural, on modern ideas of the uncanny. In the four sections Dickens himself contributed, moreover, the symbolic potential of railway lines to suggest connection counterpoises the association of technological innovation with a sense of being unsettled, derailed, fragmented. This move against fragmentation becomes particularly poignant in the context of the narrative's format. A multi-author story, Mugby Junction displays a carefully crafted inner coherence designed to guard against the fragmented nature of Dickens's earlier collaborative collections. While providing a platform for urban ghost-stories, his recasting of the railroad's imagery in the frame story hence has a double function. Hinging on metaphors of connection based on railway tracks, the resulting interplay between divergence and coupling generates the narrative's shaping force. Incorporated structurally and thematically, this interplay renders the composite work a coherent whole while also offering Dickens the opportunity to stretch the story's traditional genre and invest Gothic paradigms with new meaning. As the railroad's imagery provides an unexpected structuring device, the first two tales, "Barbox Brothers" and "Barbox Brothers and Co," form a two-part frame story that paves the way for the subsequent tales as the outcome of journeys along various branch lines. A "gentleman for Nowhere" alights at the eponymous junction and proceeds to travel along several branch lines to explore their possible destinations. Each of these lines supplies a self-contained narrative until the final, repeated journey leads him back into the past. As a result, Mugby Junction is not merely defined from the beginning as "an existential crossroads as well as a material one" (Macfarlane viii). It is the starting-point, structuring device, and externalized point of convergence of the tales that make up the whole text. In branching out, the individual segments may move along a new form of Gothic consisting of existential crossroads, the first ghost trains, and disconcerting soundscapes generated by elusive signals and overpowering noises. Simultaneously, railways also introduce new roads, new lines of divergence that facilitate the exploration of different connections. These in turn are then literalized by the linkage between the frame story's central theme and the way in which it establishes the structure of the narrative. Mugby Junction (the text) is thus literally constructed as a collection of stories retrieved from the explored railway lines. When it tracks the directionless traveler's 's awakening interest in the stories of the people he meets, the result is a two-pronged conversion: the change in the unsettled protagonist is articulated through the titular junction's transformation from an image of confusing divergence into one of joining. The narrative trajectory describes this conversion through an analogous transformation of structural metaphors. It turns the railways' most harrowing associations with unsettling mobility first into images of connectedness and ultimately even into the means to transmit stories that can facilitate connections to other people. Furthermore, in holding together the multi-author narrative, the two "Barbox stories" prompt an alternative reading of "No.1 Branch Line: The Signalman," a disturbing ghost story that climaxes with a railway disaster. To read Dickens's own, notably disparate contributions to Mugby Junction within this context is to direct fresh attention to the ways in which the narrative as a whole extends the confines of genre. …

Pickwick on Pots-Transfer Printed Ceramics and Dickens's Early Illustrated Fiction

Abstract: Given the massive amount of printed material and other forms of cultural memorabilia generated by and dependent on the commercial success of the original publication of Dickens's early novels, (1) surprisingly few transfer printed pots using Dickensian designs were produced during the first two decades of his success between 1830 and 1850. Such a paucity of Dickensian images reflects a wider absence of literary sources, and especially illustrated comic texts, from decorative ceramics produced during this period. The dearth of Dickensian material is startling enough to have been noticed in a suggestive article by an archaeologist, Gavin Lucas, in which he seeks to connect transfer printed pottery designs, the history of the reading public and the archaeology of ceramic artefacts (Lucas 134). Using A. W. Coysh's and R. K. Henrywood's standard work on blue and white pottery as his source, Lucas has found "remarkably few scenes derived from literary fiction" (134). He notes that "Walter Scott's novels dominate the pattern output" and that "apart from a few, rare patterns referencing early Dickens novels ... his fiction is not heavily drawn upon in transfer-prints" (134-36). The "few, rare patterns" comprise Thomas Fell's "Pickwick" wares (2) from 1836-37 (Cosh and Henrywood 2:157) and Ridgway's "Master Humphrey's Clock" designs from 1840-41 (Lucas 135) (3) both of which sought to capitalize on the immediate popularity of the serial issues of Dickens's novels. By way of Pickwick pots from this date Coysh and Henrywood record only a cup and saucer ornamented with a transfer printed design showing Pickwick "with another man seated at a table in the garden of a thatched house in front of a lake" (Coysh and Henrywood 2: 157) and marked "Pickwick" and "T. F. & Co." The initials T. F. refer to Thomas Fell & Co., a well known and long lived firm producing relatively unsophisticated table wares from the St. Peter's Pottery in Newcastle-on-Tyne. (4) But with these exceptions neither Coysh and Henrywood nor Gillian Neale list any other Dickensian transfer printed pottery produced before 1850, thus supporting Lucas's arguments about the surprising absence of Pickwick from early Victorian transfer-printed wares. Lucas, in bringing together consideration of the material nature and social utility of transfer printed wares with a history of the interests of the contemporary reading public, offers a series of thoughtful, if not always convincing, speculations for the failure of Dickens's early work, despite its popularity in print culture and theatre, to make much of an impression on the considerable market for transfer printed pottery. (5) Given, as Lucas rightly comments, "earthenwares, particularly the whitewares ... easily offered themselves up for illustrations taken from books or prints like a blank canvas or piece of paper" (139), why were there so few Pickwickian pots? In this essay, I want to supplement Lucas's discussion by introducing a range of Pickwick wares which have been overlooked in previous discussions, and, using these artefacts as a prompt, re-think Lucas's arguments about the intersecting socio-cultural elements which kept Dickens's early novels from joining Walter Scott's fiction and Dr. Syntax's adventures, illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson, as a major visual source for domestic tableware manufactured between 1830 and 1860. The Staffordshire firm of J. and R. Godwin, operating from Lincoln Pottery, Sneyd Green, Cobridge, produced, among many items, a range of mugs and loving cups, presumably in the late 1830s, using designs drawn from Hablot K. Browne's original illustrations to The Pickwick Papers. These pots reproduced scenes taken from Browne's illustrations in color, and thus lie slightly outside the precise boundaries of "blue and white" china, which may account for their absence from Coysh and Henrywood's listings. J. and R. Godwin's company was one of many Staffordshire firms producing a broad range of transfer printed pottery both for use and for decoration. …

Richard Flanagan. Wanting

Abstract: Richard Flanagan Wanting New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 2008 Pp 252 $2400 "The distance between savagery and civilization is measured by our control of our basest instincts" (Flanagan 126) This assertion, articulated by Lady Jane Franklin in Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan's 2008 historical novel, Wanting, could have been--and indeed is, in other words --uttered by any number of the novel's central characters, The distinction between unbridled desire and stultifying self-control echoes through the novel like a mantra, and what could, in a less capable author's hands, read as annoyingly redundant instead comes with each repetition to sound like an increasingly desperate, self-aware, and futile attempt to repress one's inner savage At the center of the novel's account of attempts to tame the passions is the character of Charles Dickens in the 1850s, struggling to balance his writing, his home life, his enthusiasm for the theater, and his increasing obsession with Ellen Ternan A neo-Victorian novel concerned with the subject of emotional repression may justly raise readerly apprehensions that it will trade in caricature, offering representations of fuddy-duddy Victorians cloaking their piano legs to save their blushes Flanagan, however, anticipates and plays with this expectation His historical characters (including Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin; their adopted aboriginal daughter, Mathinna; John Forster; and George Augustus Robinson, the "Chief Protector" of the aboriginal settlement of Wybalenna in Van Diemen's Land) are indeed repressed, but their emotional struggles are deeply connected not only to their senses of self or of religion but also to their social, professional, and indeed, imperial positions To justify their power over others--or to attempt to gain more --they must create and attempt to conform to their own definition of "civilization" Perhaps inevitably, their failures to do so inflict brutal violence on others and, indeed, on themselves Flanagan's fictional plot alternates among several historical threads: the novel follows the story of Sir John Franklin's assumption of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Van Diemen's Land in the early 1840s, his subsequent failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845, and Charles Dickens's failing marriage to Catherine in the 1850s The tenuous connection among these plots is Dickens's commission from Lady Jane Franklin to vindicate Sir John and his crew from charges of cannibalism in the frozen Arctic, a task which Dickens accomplished by publishing "The Lost Arctic Voyagers" in the 2 and 9 December 1854 issues of Household Words Flanagan uses Dickens's ideological and nationalistic defense of the mariners, and his involvement in the writing and productions of the play, The Frozen Deep, which he and Wilkie Collins loosely based on the Franklin Expedition, to explore Dickens's emotional response to the metaphorical chill within his own marriage In fact, all of the novel's public and international failures (that of the British imperial project to contain and "civilize" the indigenous people of Australia and Tasmania, and that of the Franklin Expedition) are grounded in the domestic collapse of family relationships The "wanting" of the novel's title suggests desire for that which is lacking: in this novel, the lack of love, respect, and personal fulfillment are exponentially destructive Dickens's defense of Franklin from the charge of cannibalism hinges on the heroism and willpower of the British character and the British navy, and on opposing these characteristics to those of the "savage Esquimaux" who raised the charge against them "The foremost question is--not the nature of the extremity; but, the nature of the men We submit that the noble conduct and example of such men, and of their own great leader [Franklin] himself, under similar endurances, belies it, and outweighs by the weight of the whole universe the chatter of a gross handful of uncivilized people, with domesticity of blood and blubber" (Dickens 392) …