Dickens and Modernity

246 Pages·2012·3.69 MB·English

by  Juliet John (ed.)

ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2012
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the scale of the 2012 bicentenary celebrations of dickens’s birth is
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testimony to his status as one of the most globally popular literary Y
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authors the world has ever seen. yet dickens has also become A
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associated in the public imagination with a particular version of
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the Victorian past and with respectability. his continued cultural S
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prominence and the ‘brand recognition’ achieved by his image and U
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images suggest that his vision reaches beyond the Victorian period.
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yet what is the relationship between dickens and the modern world? S

do his works offer a consoling version of the past or are they 2
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attuned to that state of uncertainty and instability we associate 1
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with the nebulous but resonant concept of modernity?
this volume positions dickens as both a literary and a cultural icon
with a complex relationship to the cultural landscape in his own AD
period and since. it seeks to demonstrate that oppositions which N
have pervaded approaches to dickens –Victorian vs modern, artist DI
vs entertainer, culture vs commerce –are false, by exploring the C
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diversity and multiplicity of dickens’s textual and extra-textual
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lives. A specially commissioned Afterword by Florian Schweizer, K
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director of the dickens 2012 celebrations, offers a fascinating
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insight into the shaping of this year-long public programme of
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commemoration of dickens. like the volume as a whole, it asks us
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to consider the nature of our connection with ‘this quintessentially N
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Victorian writer’ and what it is about dickens that still appeals T
to people around the world. YS
ProFeSSor Juliet Johnholds the hildred Carlile Chair of english
literature, royal holloway, university of london.
Contributors: Jay Clayton, holly Furneaux, John drew, J
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Michaela Mahlberg, Juliet John, Michael hollington, Joss Marsh, edited by Juliet John
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Carrie Sickmann, Kim edwards Keates, dominic rainsford, i
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Florian Schweizer t

J D I C K E N S
Cover image: daniel Maclise,Nicklebyportrait of dickens (1839) o
(© Charles dickens Museum, london). h
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. A N D M O D E R N I T Y
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an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and
668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US)
www.boydellandbrewer.com
Essays and Studies 2012
Series Editor: Elaine Treharne
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The English Association
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Essays and Studies 2012
Dickens and Modernity
Edited by
Juliet John
for the English Association
D. S. BREWER
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ESSAYS AND STUDIES 2012
IS VOLUME SIXTY-FIVE IN THE NEW SERIES
OF ESSAYS AND STUDIES COLLECTED ON BEHALF OF
THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION
ISSN 0071-1357
© The English Association 2012
All Rights Reserved.
Unauthorised publication contravenes applicable laws
First published 2012
D. S. Brewer, Cambridge
D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd
PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK
and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.
668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731 USA
website: www.boydellandbrewer.com
ISBN 978-1-84384-326-9
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of
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does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate
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Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products
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Contents
List of iLLustrations vii
acknowLedgements viii
notes on the contributors ix
introduction 1
Juliet John
1. the dickens tape: affect and sound reproduction 19
in The Chimes
Jay Clayton
2. dickens, sexuaLity and the body; or, cLock Loving: 41
master humphrey’s Queer objects of desire
Holly Furneaux
3. texts, paratexts and ‘e-texts’: the poetics of 61
communication in dickens’s journaLism
John Drew
4. corpus styListics – dickens, text-drivenness and 94
the fictionaL worLd
Michaela Mahlberg
5. things, words and the meanings of art 115
Juliet John
6. dickens and the circus of modernity 133
Michael Hollington
7. the Oliver! phenomenon; or, ‘pLease, sir, 150
we want more and more!’
Joss Marsh and Carrie Sickmann
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8. ‘wow! she’s a Lesbian. got to be!’: re-reading/ 171
re-viewing dickens and neo-victorianism on the bbc
Kim Edwards Keates
9. out of pLace: DaviD COpperfielD’s irresoLvabLe geographies 193
Dominic Rainsford
10. afterword: the 2012 bicentenary 209
Florian Schweizer
index 223
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Illustrations
Fig. 1.1 ‘The Tower of the Chimes’ 23
Fig. 1.2 ‘The Second Quarter’ 24
Fig. 10.1 Daniel Maclise, Nickleby portrait of Dickens (1839) 213
Fig. 10.2 Dickens 2012 logo (© Charles Dickens Museum) 222
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Elaine Treharne for inviting me to edit this volume, to
my husband Calum and my children Iona, Hamish and Seren, for tolerat-
ing the time it took up in the run-up to Christmas 2011, and to Holly
Furneaux, for commenting on a draft of my essay. My own contributions
to this book are published here for the first time but at times revisit textual
examples used in my book Dickens and Mass Culture (2010) in order to
expand, evolve and reframe earlier analyses.
Web addresses referred to in the volume were current as of April 2012.
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Notes on the Contributors
Jay Clayton, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Vanderbilt
University, is author of Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of
the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003) and other books on
nineteenth-century literature.
John Drew is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bucking-
ham, where he has taught since 1998. His publications include extensive
work on the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (1999), the co-editing
(with Michael Slater) of volume 4 of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’
Journalism (2000), and an edition of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian
Gray (2001). He is author of the first full-length study of Dickens as a
journalist, Dickens the Journalist (2003), and of numerous articles and
reviews on aspects of Victorian periodical culture. He is currently direct-
ing the Dickens Journals Online project, due to be launched in 2012, which
is based around an open-access digital edition of Household Words and
All the Year Round, the phenomenally popular Victorian magazines edited
by Dickens between 1850 and 1870. The work has been funded in large
measure by the Leverhulme Trust, and also involves a large-scale public/
community collaboration.
Holly Furneaux is a Reader in Victorian Literature at the University of
Leicester. She is author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities
(2009), editor of John Forster’s Life of Charles Dickens (2011), and, with
Professor Sally Ledger, Dickens in Context (2011). She has also co-edited
special editions of the journals 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long
Nineteenth Century and Critical Survey, and has published articles about
various aspects of Victorian literature and culture and the histories of
sexuality and gender. Her current research is focused on Victorian mili-
tary men of feeling.
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