The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity by Harry Stone (review)

90Victorian Review only when it is used, but as soon as it is used in any way, one's power over it changes, even ends. Grandcourt realizes early on that his financial power is limited and thus not very interesting, and so he turns to exercise the more challenging power he has over his wife. Daniel Deronda diminishes the importance of capital with the "displacement of economic by psychic mastery" (92). In the two Dickens novels, women can serve as a positive alternative to "insecure marketplace property" (98); here, the alternative is not positive but sinister. The final chapter, on Silas Marner, analyzes the miser's love of gold as a freedom from socially sanctioned notions of acceptable physical behavior. When Eppie's presence transforms him, Silas Marner internalizes society's sense of propriety and thus loses some independence even as he is redeemed. The role of capital here seems much the simplest it has been in any of these four books, and this chapter, while not uninteresting, falls oddly at the book's end. For aU its acuity, The Afterlife of Property has some regrettable weaknesses. The writing style too often seems the product of haste and inadequate attention to the reader's existence. Relatedly, Nunokawa often fails to lead the reader smoothly along his line of reasoning when he easily might. He occasionaUy draws connections that are dubious at best (as when he seeks to cast Walter Gay's memories of Florence Dombey as being essentially Oriental) or exaggerates without justification or need; but then, perhaps most books do. Of more concern is the failure of the book to move beyond its narrow focus on portions of four novels; apart from some other Dickens and EUot novels, only Vanity Fair and The Moonstone get any mention. The book's scope should seem less arbitrary, and the issues raised here should be explored further afield than we see. RICHARD C. BURKE Lynchburg College Harry Stone. The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity. Columbus: Ohio State UP. 1994. xxx + 726. $65.00 US (cloth). The aim of Harry Stone's newest study is "to highlight dimensions of [Dickens's] thought and art that have gone largely unnoticed or unappreciated" (xx). By way of foregrounding such dimensions, Stone spotlights neglected or unknown materials by both Dickens and his Reviews91 contemporaries, using these to illuminate three inter-related aspects of the "darker" Dickens which have, he claims, remained "largely unaddressed in Dickens criticism" (xxiii). These are his "nightmare concern" (xxii) with cannibalism; his concentration on passion as an irresistible, even self-destructive, force; and his exploration of necessity in terms of the hidden forces, historical and personal, by which individuals are driven. The study itself is organized into three parts; and although Stone underlines the key importance of each of these "night-side" matters, the emphasis is indubitably on Part I, "Dickens and Cannibalism". This section occupies over 260 pages — a hundred more than are devoted to Part II ("Dickens and Passion"), and 160 more than are devoted to Part III ("Dickens and Necessity"). This first section is also the most illuminating with respect to the entirety of the Dickens oeuvre, and the most fascinating. Part I surveys a wealth of material from the late eighteenth to midnineteenth centuries that underscores the preponderance of cannibaUsm as a perennial topic of popular discourse, including the visual arts. From this evidence, it appears that "the lore of man-eating" (9) was a cultural, as much as a personal, preoccupation. Stone refers to Dickens's "cannibalistic obsessions" (43), but the many sources and influences that he shows helped to shape Dickens's Uterary imagination also point to a multitude of "obsessions" generated through, and across, an entire spectrum of cultural productions. From folk and fairy tales, nurses' stories, picture books, chapbooks, comic songs, ballads, broadsides, handbills, play-bills, squibs, penny weeklies, dreamers, confessions, criminal Uves, travelogues, martyrologies, and Gothic tales; from toy theatrical scenes and characters, London fairs and shows, and from the windows of print-sellers, Dickens imbibed an extensive cannibal-lore which subsequently became, says Stone, "a generative part of his shaping night side" (73). An avid reader of volumes of voyages...