Contemporary Dickens (review)

It may not be entirely right, but it's certainly not wrong to argue that, like Caesar's Gallia, all current Dickensia can be divided into three, if not parts, then parties, each descending from an extraordinarily philoprogenitive, mid-twentieth-century founder. Those founders are, by my account, Kathleen Tillotson, J. Hillis Miller, and Steven Marcus (displacing but also building on an earlier triumvirate, as Deborah Epstein Nord notes, of Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, and Humphrey House). Each of the three taught us to think about Charles Dickens in different yet complementary ways. Tillotson helped us recognize the novels as, first and perhaps foremost, publications. Miller taught us to see them primarily as texts (though precisely what that term might involve has changed radically decade by decade over a long and—if we dare say it in this context—inimitable career). And these texts Marcus insistently set into often quite unexpected contexts contemporary to both Dickens and to ourselves. It's no surprise, then, to find a volume of essays entitled Contemporary Dickens situating itself primarily, and worthily, in the Marcus line. The collection is dedicated to him, and about him it makes a very large claim indeed: in the words of the co-editors, Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David, he "inspired a new mode of inquiry, one that we would now call cultural studies" (9). On that line of the new and the contemporary, this volume lays its keel.

Don't be alarmed. This contemporary doesn't offer Dickens as the chief inspiration for President Obama's inaugural address, or the matrix for his next book, Dreams from the Audacity of My Dickens. Or would it be The Audacity of My Dickens Dreams? Contemporary here points to matters not quite so immediate, and yet, perhaps, still more audacious, seeking to "free us," as Elaine Freedgood puts it, "from the conventions of literary criticism as it has been practiced," redirecting us toward what "we have been taught not to look seriously or thoughtfully at" (165).

It does this by deploying contemporary in two different but complementary ways. In the more obvious of the two, chapter after chapter finds fresh ways to represent Dickens as not just a man, but the man of his own times, deeply engaged by the major issues that confronted and regularly staggered his contemporaries, cardinal among them "moral philosophy, the psychology of the emotions, liberal theory, life writing, nationalism and national character" (3). And, since these are ideas that drive the forward edge of contemporary criticism, Dickens becomes, in this account, our contemporary also. Or perhaps it is more accurate to put the argument the other way round: Dickens is not so much our contemporary as we are his. These chapters, then, don't merely "explore the genealogy of contemporary ideas." More boldly, and resonantly, they "question the originality of our current ways of knowing," concluding that "upon examination, postmodern epistemology appears to be less a 'break' from our Victorian past than a feature of its development" (3).

In large part this shift means coming to acknowledge, as James Eli Adams argues, that Dickens is "a good deal more canny, more knowing, than we tend to allow" (243). And if we accede to the likelihood of this knowing, it then also becomes us to trim if not surrender our own smug "knowingness," that suspicion of fiction's evasions, concealments, and repressions that drives the Freudian, the Marxist, and the Foucauldian agenda. No longer can we treat each text as a sort of wordy Trojan horse, threatening annihilating, carceral, panoptical cooptation, if we surrender our suspicions and breach the self's protective palisade.

These fourteen essays make that double point in a dazzling variety of ways. My allotted word count can't begin even minimally to sketch the main point of each. And it would be invidious to single out only a few from a collection so uniformly excellent and astonishingly various. So let me simply say that no one who cares about...