Dickens and New Historicism (review)

According to William J. Palmer, Charles Dickens “articulated and embodied 100 years before the fact, the governing principles of the New Historicist project” (17). An assessment of his Dickens and New Historicism might depend on what one thinks about this particular claim, which I shall discuss in detail below. It might also depend on what one thinks of this kind of claim, by which I mean the need to recertify canonical authors by demonstrating their intuitive knowledge—avant-la-lettre—of twentieth-century critical fashion. This is not the same as the project of rereading, as when a critic reinterprets a text according to the precepts of a new theory; rather, it combines the above with an assertion that the author in question was an early practitioner of the very theory his or her work is said to exemplify. Thus, as critical movements gain prominence, library shelves attest to the uncanny prescience with which the work of certain authors embodies principles literary theorists have only recently—and, the implication is, more lamely—articulated. Dickens is, by such accounts, (for example) a feminist, a postmodernist, or, in this most recent incarnation, a New Historicist. The effect, perhaps not wholly accidental, of this claim—and Palmer’s book is a case in point—is to reposition at the center of discussion the emphasis on individual genius that the new critical school is, in all likelihood, attempting to displace.

Two principles inform Palmer’s readings of Dickens, and, according to him, Dickens’s readings of Victorian society: the first is a concern with the idea of history itself, the second a compelling interest in representing and giving voice to the socially marginal. In practical terms, both involve a discussion of various eighteenth-century influences on Dickens’s work, as in his revision of eighteenth-century ideas of benevolence, or his reworkings of George Lillo’s characters, especially George Barnwell. The book’s most plausible claim to a New-Historicist emphasis lies in its discussion of shipwreck narratives, the role of which in several novels Palmer seeks to demonstrate. He suggests, for instance, that the recurrent use of shipwreck metaphors in David Copperfield (1849–50) reveals Dickens to be a revisionist historian who replaces a romantic conception of history with a “counter-text of Social Realism” (15). All these arguments are explicitly intended to substantiate the claim that Dickens should be considered a self-conscious philosopher of history; for Palmer, Dickens consistently “position[ed] his art within a dialogic sense of historical flux and historical continuity” (100).

Much of the “newness” of New Historicism, as Palmer is well aware, consists of the repositioning and, to varying extents, levelling of texts, so that historical documents become interpretable in traditionally “literary” ways, while traditional literary texts are newly envisioned as agents in non-literary contexts. As a corollary, the language of New Historical readings tends to avoid what H. Aram Veeser refers to as “an outmoded vocabulary of allusion, symbolization, allegory, and mimesis” in order to “expose the manifold ways culture and society affect one another” (The New Historicism [1989] xii).

Palmer’s model is the New Historical recontextualization of canonical works, which he admires for its ability to generate “drastically new” readings (7). But where a New-Historical reading would insist on the material reality of shipwrecks and shipwreck narratives, for Palmer materiality is displaced by the idea that a shipwreck is an idea: most significant, that is, not as historical reality but as Dickensian metaphor (a metaphor, finally, for Victorian society itself). Indeed, in this book the most significant player is the author’s imagination—in Palmer’s idealizing term (a familiar one in Dickens criticism) his “alchemical” imagination. With the help of such a reading, I can imagine an argument that locates Dickens’s New Historicism not in his ability to return readers to history but rather in the way he narrativizes history. But Palmer’s point that shipwreck is a “historically based metaphor” (70), one on which Dickens relied...