The Violated Man of Letters: Dickens Studies between Truth and Appropriation

The three books here reviewed could not be more different from one another, apparently. What subject may a queer reading of Dickens's oeuvre, a biography of Mrs. Charles Dickens, and a psychoanalytic study of Bleak House ever have in common? The answer is in fact very simple: family. One of the major subjects in Dickens's fiction is dealt with by the authors of these books in ways that try to reshape our ideas of what it is that makes his domestic plots or biographical details interesting to us. The focus on our reception is very strong in all of these books and I choose to consider it as a major issue in this essay review for reasons related to the relationship between the ethics of reading and the appropriation of the past by the present.

According to Holly Furneaux's Queer Dickens, "it is a rigorously defamiliarized domestic that Dickens persistently recommends" (23). That is why his fiction matters to queer studies. By arguing how Dickens and other major Victorian novelists all make use of narratives "that celebrate surrogate parenting, particularly foster fathering, to question the assumed moral superiority of the biological family unit and denaturalize the received family pattern of physically related kin" (25), Furneaux shows how families of choice inform Dickens's fiction in ways that challenge twentieth-century reductions of the complexity of Victorian practices. Her main concern is to alert the reader about the possibility for the queer subject to participate in the shaping of familial models—since queer theorists who see domestic life and collective political action as parallel lines fail to "recognize the continuing contestation of what constitutes family and the increasing distance between sexual and reproductive agendas" (26). Yet her analysis of Dickens's own reasons for celebrating the suitability of the confirmed bachelor or the single male parent to foster a child (extended all through chapters 1 and 2) does not run the risk of undergoing an uneven development. On the contrary, the author always gives the impression of having a genuine concern for the otherness she is dealing with. When treating the subject of Mr. Brownlow's motives to foster Oliver Twist, for instance, she acknowledges the regulatory risk in considering the possibility of his erotic interests towards the child but also reminds the reader that most of the adaptations of Oliver Twist felt the need to create family ties between the two, which do not appear in Dickens's novel. This specific instance reminds us that while Victorian ideas of childhood were so different from ours that Mr. Brownlow's choice should not be reduced to one single reason—whatever that is—it is also true that the modern anxiety with pedophilia makes it very hard for us not to consider the option, hence the sanitization of Mr. Brownlow by means of the establishment of a family connection to Oliver in most of the novel's adaptations.

Furneaux's discourse on Dickens's vision of educational reform, which he described extensively between the 1830s and the 1850s, is appropriate, because it stresses interest in personal attention to the child against the risk of a depersonalizing structure similar to a military hierarchy. (See Lauren Goodlad Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society [2003].) In light of the systematic accusations characters like David Copperfield have been subjected to since the release of Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments (1988), I have found this point particularly important. Critics who apostrophize David Copperfield's progress in life as delusive and interested do not seem to recognize that the context of the novel makes it imperative for David to reject an idea of discipline that would make him similar to an automaton. If his efforts in learning shorthand and compiling a...