A Companion to Charles Dickens (review)

A Companion to Charles Dickens contains five sections and thirty-six chapters, each by a different author, some reprising material previously published at greater length. These sections cover Charles Dickens's life; literary and cultural contexts; "English History Contexts" (with a nice essay on "Dickens and America (1842)" by Nancy Aycock Metz smuggled in); "The Fiction"—a section without material on either Sketches by Boz (1836) or the Christmas Books; and "Reputation and Influence," which finishes with a smart essay by John O. Jordan called "Postcolonial Dickens." The choice of material is sound; while complaints about omissions are bound to arise and to be met with the reply that the volume was already long enough, it would have been interesting to see one chapter on Dickens's reading and another on what he thought about the novel as an art form. The book downplays Pictures from Italy (1846) and, despite a useful chapter from John M. L. Drew on Dickens as journalist, leaves The Uncommercial Traveller (1860-69) underdiscussed, while overall the short fiction, on which it would be useful to have guidance, is neglected.

The chapter on Dickens and popular culture by Juliet John might have taken account of the popular songs (Tom Moore not the least) that run through Dickens's texts and contribute to their own poetry in prose; Moore is so consistently quoted that he could appear there or, alongside Shakespeare, in the adjacent essay, Patricia Ingham's "The Language of Dickens," which surprisingly does not reference G. L. Brook's The Language of Dickens (1970). Each chapter contains something I did not know before, and each is not only informative but, usually, fair to different critical positions. There are good, memorable essays by Gareth Cordery on David Copperfield (1849-50), Robert Tracy on Bleak House (1852-53), Anne Humpherys on Hard Times (1854), and by Philip Davis on A Tale of Two Cities (1859). Brigid Lowe makes useful points in her essay on Dombey and Son (1846-48), though her omission of Susan Nipper from her list of the novel's surrogate mothers skews her conclusion that the best mothering was done by men—which seems wrong, or sentimental—and her over-emphasis on the novel as "domestic" gives space neither for the novel's politics nor for the newness of the railway (363). This last deficiency is partly resolved by Trey Philpotts's splendid essay, "Dickens and Technology."

Andrew Sanders's discussion of the "droll" nature of Great Expectations (1861) deserves attention but flattens out the novel's complexity (423): is it true that until Magwitch reappears, Pip is "unquestionably happy" with his good fortune (429)? It would have been good to have had more on Dickens and comedy, a neglected topic; R. C. Churchill's unreferenced essay "Dickens, Drama and Tradition" (1942) would make an interesting beginning. Valentine Cunningham's "Dickens and Christianity" makes good points about his Unitarianism. Jan-Melissa Schramm addresses an important gap in the criticism with "Dickens and the Law," though it misses Dieter Paul Polloczek's discussion of Bleak House in Literature and Legal Discourse (1999). No contributor quite addresses adequately Dickens's speeches and their interest, and the Companion could have been more sensitive about Humphrey House, John Butt, Kathleen Tillotson, and K. J. Fielding, all of whose work on Dickens was essential and, in many ways, not exceeded here, save in accretion of points of detail not available to them.

Not everything can be discussed, of course, but a bias in favour of analysing the novels via character and plot (for example, Goldie Morgentaler's examination of Martin Chuzzlewit [1843-44], but effectively throughout the essays on Dickens's fiction) means that in practice, other positions are not attempted or are consigned to a list of approaches summarised by Lyn Pykett's "Dickens and Criticism." Here, her close attention to Michel Foucault entails a corresponding lack of attention to Karl Marx, an emphasis which...