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  • The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization
  • Deborah Wynne (bio)
The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization, by David Payne; pp. xiii + 206. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, £45.00, $65.00.

David Payne's ambitious book, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Serialization, offers an interesting new perspective on the social and cultural work of the Victorian serial novel. Drawing upon the theories of Karl Marx and Max Weber, Payne argues that the serialized novel negotiated the tensions between Victorian society's preoccupation with spiritual values and an economic system based on individualism. He suggests that Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot used their serialized fiction [End Page 756] to "reenchant" society—the term "reenchantment" is adapted here from Weber's description of the secularization of modern social and economic life, "the disenchantment of the world." For Payne, this process of reenchantment is characterized by irony, for each writer critiqued a modernity divested of spiritual values by means of a literary format, the monthly part issue, that acted as "a potent sign of the commodification of culture" (ix).

Payne's argument focuses on the concerns felt by Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot about the economic forces at work in Victorian society and the split between religious and secular culture. He demonstrates how they attempted to expose and resolve these shifts in increasingly complex ways in their fiction. Adopting the concept of "atonement" from Boyd Hilton's The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Nineteenth-Century Social Thought (1991), Payne demonstrates how traditional Christian beliefs in the redemptive power of human suffering were used by these novelists to combat the debasing tendencies of modern commodity culture. In chapters on Sketches by Boz (1836–37) and Oliver Twist (1838), Vanity Fair (1847–48), Little Dorrit (1855–57), Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), and Middlemarch (1871–72), Payne suggests that each author was guilty of a level of hypocrisy: "invoking myths of benevolence and sacrifice from a lost Christian culture" (147) to portray a disenchanted world, each at the same time used the lucrative form of the serialized novel.

While it comes as no surprise that Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot were fallible human beings who did not always practise what they preached, Payne's argument about Victorian professional writers is neither simplistic nor reductive. His book is particularly valuable in tracing the careers of Dickens and Eliot within the turbulent literary cultures of their day. The discussions of Dickens's early work, Sketches by Boz and Oliver Twist, and Eliot's first published fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life, illustrate their approaches to preaching moral truths in a secular society. In a fine chapter on Dickens's role as public reader and the serialization of Little Dorrit, Payne combines a close reading of the serialized novel with an exploration of Dickens's development as novelist, actor, public reader, and political activist. Highlighting the importance of Dickens's collaborations with Wilkie Collins, Payne demonstrates how Dickens used the emotional energies of his public performances to represent transcendent spiritual values in an age that fetishized money and commodities. He argues that Little Dorrit "interrogate[s] the very largest categories of modern, as opposed to merely 'modernist' meaning: commodity and art, society and individual, development and trauma, psyche and text" (7).

Payne also views Eliot's Middlemarch as a secular text that directly tackles the problems of modernity. Eliot, he argues, adopted "a rhetoric inherited from Christian theology" (123) in order to engage her readers in her moral vision. He focuses on the novel's preoccupation with economic failure, its depictions of economic stagnation being related to the social "disenchantment" Eliot sought to address. Yet, as Payne is quick to point out, the novel's appearance in the "innovative commodity form" of the bimonthly serial (125) meant that the enterprising Eliot profited well from her message of economic failure.

The chapter on Thackeray's Vanity Fair is not as satisfying as those on Dickens's and Eliot's fiction, and it does not fit comfortably into the scheme of Payne's book because there is little direct engagement...

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