The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture)

221 Pages·2005·1.44 MB·English

by  David Payne

The Reenchantment of
Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Serialization
David Payne
The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
General Editor: Joseph Bristow, Professor of English, UCLA
Editorial Advisory Board: Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck College, University of London;
Josephine McDonagh, Linacre College, University of Oxford; Yopie Prins, Uni-
versity of Michigan; Lindsay Smith, University of Sussex; Margaret D. Stetz,
University of Delaware; Jenny Bourne Taylor, University of Sussex
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a new monograph
series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that
were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic
Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between “Roman-
tic” and “Victorian”, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to
reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural,
literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the
increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary
forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that
has affected not only the period 1800–1900 but also every field within the dis-
cipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical per-
spectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings
of this era.
Titles include:
Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (editors)
ENCOUNTERS IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS
Editors, Authors, Readers
Dennis Denisoff
SEXUAL VISUALITY FROM LITERATURE TO FILM, 1850–1950
Laura E. Franey
VICTORIAN TRAVEL WRITING AND IMPERIAL VIOLENCE
Lawrence Frank
VICTORIAN DETECTIVE FICTION AND THE NATURE OF EVIDENCE
The Scientific Investigations of Poe, Dickens and Doyle
David Payne
THE REENCHANTMENT OF NINETEENTH CENTURY FICTION
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth Century Writing and Culture
Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–97700–9 (hardback)
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The Reenchantment of
Nineteenth-Century
Fiction
Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
and Serialization
David Payne
© David Payne 2005
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First published 2005 by
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ISBN-13:978–1–4039–4774–1
ISBN-10:1–4039–4774–0
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Payne,David,1961–
The reenchantment of nineteenth-century fiction :Dickens,
Thackeray,George Eliot,and serialization / David Payne.
p. cm.– (Palgrave studies in nineteenth-century writing and
culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–4774–0 (cloth)
1. English fiction – 19th century – History and criticism.
2. Literature publishing – Great Britain – History – 19th century.
3. Literature and society – Great Britain – History – 19th century.
4. Serialized fiction – Great Britain – History and criticism.
5. Thackeray,William Makepeace,1811–1863 – Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Dickens,Charles,1812–1870 – Criticism
and interpretation. 7. Eliot,George,1819–1880 – Criticism and
interpretation. 8. Social problems in literature. I. Title. II. Series.
PR868.P78P39 2005
823¢.809 – dc22 2004056954
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd,Chippenham and Eastbourne
For Audrey
“Behold this gateway....Two paths meet here; no one has yet followed either
to its end. This long lane stretches back for an eternity. And the long lane out
there, that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they
offend each other face to face; and it is here at this gateway that they come
together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: ‘Moment.’”
Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1 The Cockney and the Prostitute: Dickens from Sketches by
Boz to Oliver Twist 20
2 The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialization,
and Vanity Fair 44
3 Dickens Breaks Out: the Public Readings and Little Dorrit 69
4 A Dance of Indecision: George Eliot’s Shorter Fiction 95
5 The Production of Belief: the Serial, Middlemarch 122
Epilogue: The Sacred Monster: the Serial Novelists’
Reenchantment 145
Notes 153
Bibliography 183
Index 202
vii
Illustrations
1. Princess Victoria’s graveside reading: title page, Legh 7
Richmond’s The Dairyman’s Daughter (1810), courtesy General
Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations.
2. The first supper: Pickwick, plate 1 (1836), courtesy Arents 17
Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and
Tilden Foundations.
3. Punch at the pyramids: Thackeray’s illustration to the Cairo 60
number of Cornhill to Grand Cairo (1845), courtesy General
Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations.
4. Hamlet at sea: fair-copy of Wilkie Collins’s The Lighthouse 79
(1855), Act II, courtesy Henry W. and Albert A. Berg
Collection of English and American Literature, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
5. Coping with Strauss-sickness: cast of Thorvaldsen Risen Christ 102
used by Marian Evans during translation of Strauss’s Life of
Jesus, 1845–6, courtesy Coventry Libraries and Information
Services.
6. Proposed interior, St. James’s Hall, designed by Owen Jones, 140
site of concerts attended by the Leweses, late 1860s, courtesy
Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.
7. “Terror to the end”: the murder of Nancy in Dickens’s 146
personal prompt-copy of “Sikes and Nancy” (1869), courtesy
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and
American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
viii
Preface and Acknowledgements
From Elie Halévy to Boyd Hilton, historians have puzzled over nine-
teeth-century Britain’s respectable religiosity and fervent worldliness.
This book shows how Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray,
and George Eliot reenchanted the Victorian world when they delivered
their gospel of disenchantment in the symbolic vessels of Christianity,
still the primary source for their society’s ordeals of development, and
in the literary form of the serial, a potent sign of the commodification
of culture.
As Linda Colley has suggested for the period 1707–1837, and as Hilton
has shown in detail for 1785–1865, the course of nineteenth-century
modernization is most visible in the secularization of British political
economy and social theory, one example of the phenomenon Max
Weber would call “the disenchantment of the world.” With the peri-
odical press from which they sprang, Victorian serial novels served as
their age’s principal source of information about and defense against
this development. I entwine the ideological history of theology and
political economy, the literary history of the novel, and the commod-
ity history of the serial into a single sociological narrative of develop-
ments in religion, social theory, and literary culture.
With their national literary ancestors, Victorian serial novelists
shared a disposition to deny the very modernity that had elevated them
to positions of unprecedented cultural influence. In its pursuit of
categories usually inherited from the Marxian tradition (including
capital, the commodity, and the everyday, but sometimes taking up
Durkheimian anomie and Weberian spirit as well), recent literary criti-
cism has virtually ignored Victorian literary culture as a compromise-
formation between a Protestant past and a commodified present. I too
set sketches, stories, melodramas, and serials written between 1836 and
1873 in a sociological context. But I analyze them along lines sketched
out by Weber and Bourdieu as well as Marx: as negotiations with mod-
ernization on behalf of a society long hostile to social theory; as prod-
ucts of struggle within a field of cultural production; and, most
important, as expressions of the religion of benevolence appropriate to
a society of commodity producers.
My first chapter shows how ideological, literary, and commodity
history come together in the Dickens phenomenon of 1836–7. In his
ix