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Reviewed by:
  • The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens by Jon Mee, and: Charles Dickens in Context edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, and: Supposing Bleak House by John O. Jordan
  • Dianne F. Sadoff (bio)
The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens, by Jon Mee; pp. xvi + 115. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, £49.00, £12.99 paper, $79.00, $19.99 paper.
Charles Dickens in Context, edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux; pp. xxi + 405. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, £68.00, $100.00.
Supposing Bleak House, by John O. Jordan; pp. xi + 184. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010, $35.00.

These three books introduce readers to the novels of Charles Dickens, whether to the body of his work; to the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts in which he [End Page 550] wrote; or to one massive tome in his oeuvre. Each volume deploys a different critical mode or genre of writing to reach its targeted audience, and those audiences are far from identical. In general, however, these books appear to be directed not to the Dickens scholar but to students of the man whose literary career was perhaps the most important of the Victorian age.

The Cambridge Introductions to Literature series aims, its cover copy notes, to introduce “key topics and authors” to students and to general readers, and Jon Mee fulfills his mission by writing an introduction to the diversity of Dickens’s narratives rather than a guide that comments on each novel. Thus, he intends to “open up” the novels to “new readers,” always with his own experience as a “reader and teacher of Dickens” (ix)—but not to facilitate the student’s “essay … writ[ing]” (x). Mee identifies five fundamental aspects of the Dickens world: Dickens the entertainer; Dickens and language; Dickens and the city; Dickens and women at home; and adaptations of Dickens, broadly conceived, which include the public readings, nineteenth-century dramatizations, and twentiethcentury film. Although the analysis is quite basic, Mee offers good coverage of the novels and their cultural impact; he presents, in addition, many long quotations and key citations, which will, he must hope, send his readers back to the novels he writes about. This is a compact and very readable introduction to Dickens’s oeuvre.

According to its website, the Cambridge Major Authors in Context series is aimed at students and researchers of Dickens and the Victorian period. Of Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux’s volume, it cites as particularly useful the “digestible, yet detailed and self-contained chapters”; their combination of “scholarly authority with innovative new approaches”; and the provision of a “starting point for investigating any Dickensrelated topic, with suggestions on how to develop the research.” This essayistic genre, the “digestible” yet “self-contained” chapter, surpasses the encyclopedia entries in books available on the student-oriented market, since the volume delivers a quite remarkable range of historical backgrounds with which the reader of Dickens must be familiar in order to interpret the novels. Rather than a general overview of a range of topics, then, Ledger and Furneaux’s volume attends to quite specific cultural, political, and aesthetic discourses crucial to comprehension of the Victorian world in which Dickens worked.

The first section of Charles Dickens in Context treats Dickens’s “Life and Afterlife”; the second, “Social and Cultural Contexts.” Section 1 will be useful to advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. John Bowen’s two chapters on the life—before and after Ellen Ternan, a designation that attests to our changing assessment of the author’s private life—tell the story fully yet succinctly. Other chapters—on the Dickens biographies, the novels’ reviews and reviewers, twentieth-century criticism, Victorian and modern stage adaptations, screen adaptations, heritage Dickens, and neo-Victorian rewritings—cover the gamut of ways Dickens continues to be consumed, evaluated, and interpreted. Some of these essays are more compelling than others. A number of the afterlife entries, for example, reveal some weaknesses of writing or of interdisciplinary knowledge. Yet this section will help students place Dickens in his own time and account for his continuing cultural legacy well into the twenty-first century.

The thirty-four essays...

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