Dickens After Dickens

262 Pages·2020·9.715 MB·English

by  Emily Bell

Edited by Emily Bell
We have a long way to travel before D
we get back to what Dickens meant … i
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G.K. CHESTERTON, CHARLES DICKENS k
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THE 20th and 21st centuries have continued the quest, so aptly n
described by G.K. Chesterton in 1906, to ‘find’ Charles Dickens
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and recapture the characteristically Dickensian. From research

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attempting to classify and categorise the nature of his popularity
to a century of film adaptations, Dickens’s legacy encompasses an f
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array of conventional and innovative forms.
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Dickens After Dickens includes chapters from rising and leading
scholars in the field, offering creative and varied discussion of the D
continued and evolving influence of Dickens and the nature of his
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legacy across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Its chapters show the
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surprising resonances that Dickens has had and continues to have, k
arguing that the author’s impact can be seen in mainstream cultural e
phenomena such as HBO’s TV series The Wire and Donna Tartt’s n
novel The Goldfinch, as well as in diverse areas such as Norwegian s
literature, video games and neo-Victorian fiction. It discusses
Dickens as a biographical figure, an intertextual moment, and a
medium through which to explore contemporary concerns around
gender and representation.
The new research represented in this book brings together a range
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of methodologies, approaches and sources, offering an accessible Dickens
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and engaging re-evaluation that will be of interest to scholars of
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Dickens, Victorian fiction, adaptation, and cultural history, and to t
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teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ways in d
After
which we continue to read and be influenced by the author’s work.
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This collection is edited by Dr Emily Bell (Loughborough University)
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with a Foreword by Professor Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University m Dickens
of London), author of Dickens and Mass Culture. Dr Bell is a board
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member for the Oxford Dickens series and an editor for the Dickens l
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Letters Project. She also acted as the first Communications
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Committee Chair of the international Dickens Society, and has e
published on Dickens, life writing and commemoration. l
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Dickens After Dickens
Edited by
Emily Bell
Published by
White Rose University Press
(Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York)
University of York,
Heslington, York, UK, YO10 5DD
https://universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk
Dickens After Dickens
Text © The Authors, 2020
Chapter 1 draws from content from Dickens and Demolition: Literary
Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, by Joanna
Hofer-Robinson (EUP 2018), and is included with kind permission of
Edinburgh University Press.
First published 2020
Cover Illustration: Charles Dickens circa 1860s. Wikimedia: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Dickens_circa_1860s.png. Public domain
Cover designed by Tom Grady, WRUP
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912482-20-7
ISBN (PDF): 978-1-912482-21-4
ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-912482-22-1
ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-912482-23-8
DOI (volume): https://doi.org/10.22599/DickensAfterDickens
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Table of Contents
Author biographies v
Foreword vii
Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Introduction 1
Emily Bell (Loughborough University)
1. ‘Once upon a time would not prove to be All-time or even
a long time.’ From Sanitary Reform to Cultural Memory:
The Case of Jacob’s Island 15
Joanna Hofer-Robinson (University College Cork)
2. Nordic Dickens: Dickensian Resonances in the Work
of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 35
Kathy Rees (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge)
3. Dickens and Faulkner: Saving Joe Christmas 57
Katie Bell
4. ‘Awaiting the death blow’: Gendered Violence and Miss
Havisham’s Afterlives 83
Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough University)
5. The Unfinished Picture: The Mystery of Rosa Bud 101
Pete Orford (University of Buckingham)
6. ‘The Thing and Not the Thing’: The Contemporary
Dickensian Novel and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) 117
Rob Jacklosky (College of Mount Saint Vincent)
7. Little Nell in the Cyber Age 141
Francesca Arnavas (University of Tartu)
8. Dickensian Realism in The Wire 159
Laurena Tsudama (Rutgers University)
9. Grand Aspirations: Putting Pip on the Stage
Adaptations and Absences 177
Michael Eaton
10. Fictional Dickenses 197
Emily Bell (Loughborough University)
11. Waiting, for Dickens 215
John Bowen (University of York)
Index 233
Author biographies
Francesca Arnavas, Research Fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia,
working within the research group Narrative, Culture, and Cognition.
Emily Bell, Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Loughborough Univer-
sity, UK; editor for the Oxford Dickens series and the Dickens Letters Project.
Katie Bell, independent researcher with specialism in Dickens, Poe, and
American Southern Gothic fiction; PhD from the University of Leicester, UK.
John Bowen, Professor of 19th Century Literature, University of York, UK.
Michael Eaton, award-winning dramatist who has adapted the works
of Dickens for radio, TV and the theatre.
Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Lecturer in 19th Century Literature at University
College Cork, Ireland.
Rob Jacklosky, Professor of English at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, US.
Juliet John, Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature and Head of
Humanities, Royal Holloway, University of London; keynote speaker at the
‘After Dickens’ conference, University of York, 2016.
vi Author biographies
Claire O’Callaghan, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, UK.
Pete Orford, Course Director of the MA in Charles Dickens Studies at the
University of Buckingham, UK; Academic Associate of Charles Dickens
Museum, London.
Kathy Rees, Research Associate at Wolfson College, University of
Cambridge, UK.
Laurena Tsudama, PhD student in the English Department at Rutgers
University, US.
Foreword
Juliet John, Royal Holloway, University of London
I want to suppose a certain SHADOW, which may go into any place …
and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be
cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty
…; a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature. …
I want the compiled part of the paper to express the idea of this
Shadow’s having been in libraries, and among the books referred to.
I want him to loom as a fanciful thing all over London; … an odd, unsub-
stantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power
going about … in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and
which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for
their imagination, while it will represent common sense and humanity.
I want to express in the title, and in the grasp of the idea to express also,
that it is the Thing at everybody’s elbow, and in everybody’s footsteps. At
the window, by the fire, in the street, in the house, from infancy to old
age, everyone’s inseparable companion.
(Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster, 7 October 1849)
This is Charles Dickens trying to explain to John Forster what he wanted his
own journal to achieve: nothing short of an ‘omnipresent’ influence, intangi-
ble yet pervasive, mysterious yet associated with ‘common sense and human-
ity’. There is, arguably, no better summary of Dickens’s wildly ambitious vision
for his own art and influence than this under-studied passage. Not content
with conventional literary influence, Dickens wanted, like the Shadow he
describes, to be here, there, and everywhere, yet simultaneously unfathomable,
an ‘unthought-of Power’. Could this be why his will famously ‘conjure[d]’ his
friends, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or
viii Foreword
testimonial whatsoever’ (Forster 859)? As Emily Bell discusses in her Introduc-
tion to this volume, the instructions of his will have baffled many; but viewed
through the perspective of this earlier letter to Forster, it seems much easier to
understand why Dickens would have preferred to figure his influence through
the ubiquitous, uncircumscribed, immaterial ‘Power’ of the Shadow, than
through the materially and intellectually circumscribed forms of the monu-
ment, memorial or testimonial.
The ‘After Dickens’ conference held at the University of York in 2016 was
one of the best Dickens conferences I have attended in some time, gathering
academics from a range of disciplines to reflect on the ‘unthought-of Power’ of
Dickens’s legacy. 150 years after his death, Dickens’s influence seems obvious
and substantial, but its nature is somehow also intangible. As E. M. Forster said
of Mr Pickwick many years ago, he seems to be ‘round’, yet viewed edgeways
is ‘not thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view’
(79). This verdict on Dickens is often seen as damning, but Forster’s main point
is that Dickens’s ‘conjuring trick’ is unfathomable. Critics are still trying to work
it out; moreover, the ‘conjuring’ seems to underscore not just his characters, but
his cultural influence, and indeed the very idea of Dickens. When John Bowen
argues in this volume that we are always ‘waiting on’ and ‘waiting for’ Dickens,
is this because he is always there and not there: a Shadow?
It has not always seemed so: before post-structuralists began to probe the
notion that Dickens was a failed realist, and biographers began to strip away
the layers of biographical myth-making that Dickens himself had himself set
in train, the author had perhaps seemed more knowable. And, perhaps, more
limited, because what was known was limited, lacking the ‘sideway view’. It is
perhaps surprising that widespread critical attention to Dickens’s broader influ-
ence on British and global culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, coming
after the Dickens of post-structuralism and biographical revisionism: always
evident in pockets, Dickens’s cultural influence has crystallised as perhaps the
most dynamic area of current Dickens studies since the 2012 bicentenary, when
the question of what Dickens meant to different kinds of people around the
world garnered global attention. The question of what is, perhaps, easier to
answer than why – and even where – however: why the influence of Dickens
extended so far beyond, as well as after, Dickens.
As Emily Bell argues in her Introduction, critical studies of Dickensian after-
lives tend to take either a panoramic or a very focused view, examining specific
intertextual relationships. Both approaches have their value, but the ideal would
surely be synergy between the macro and the micro view. Building on her work
as organiser of ‘After Dickens’, Bell takes us here on a journey towards synergy,
bookending the collection with her own fine, macroscopic Introduction and
the pairing of her subtle and considered chapter on biofiction with her former
supervisor John Bowen’s characteristically clever literary and philosophical take
on ‘Waiting for Dickens’. In between, the standard of the chapters is uniformly
high: there is a specific emphasis on reading Dickens and intertextuality – not