Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence by Andrew Mangham (review)

Charles Dickens seems often to have imagined his own death. Across the corpus of his fiction, readers cannot escape the frequency and the intensity of his references to death-bed partings, the physical sufferings and mental dread of the dying, the paraphernalia of mourning, the rituals of remembrance, the stubborn physicality of the corpse left behind to serve as evidence of some gruesome crime. The clues left at sites of untimely death activate his detective plots, power his depictions of criminal trials, and demonstrate his abiding interest in the spectacle of justice. His sketches and journalistic essays also include famous descriptions of visits to morgues and the cells of condemned men, as well as several well-documented attendances at public executions (notably the hangings of François Courvoisier in 1840 and Maria Manning in 1849). For a brief period in the mid-1840s, he campaigned against the death penalty, although his resistance to its use diminished once executions retreated behind prison walls, thus reducing excuses for carnivalesque disorder amongst lower-class attendees at the foot of the scaffold at Tyburn or outside Newgate Gaol. Eminent literary critics, including John Bowen, Philip Davis and Garrett Stewart, have traced the impact of death on Dickens’s style and illustrated the extent to which Dickens’s apprehensions of his own mortality almost single-handedly powered his sentimentality. Andrew Mangham’s study – one of the first to bring Dickens’s fiction into conversation with the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities – offers an insightful contribution to this critical conversation about Dickens and his preoccupation with the sufferings, symbolism and polyvalent significances of death and dying.

Dickens’s Forensic Realism opens with a summary of nineteenth-century medical milestones in the nascent field of forensic science: this is clear, cogent work which makes the material easily accessible to the non-specialist reader. Mangham is also well-informed about modern criticism of Dickens’s fiction, and he ranges with confidence across a variety of primary and secondary texts. The book opens with a modest disclaimer – Mangham agrees with the observation of numerous earlier critics to the effect that Dickens was not a serious student of science – and instead Mangham makes a more modest but at the same time more telling claim: he wants to illuminate the ways in which as a consequence of “popular journalism, the field in which young Dickens served his novitiate, crimes against the body became fodder for the reading public, and reports of medical experts giving their opinions on anatomical or circumstantial evidence reached the doormats and breakfast tables of millions of households every day” (14). Mangham maps with care and precision Dickens’s indebtedness to penny dreadfuls, the Newgate Calendar, and the Terrific Register, which did much to shape the recreational tastes of the readers who subsequently devoured Dickens’s fiction with such enthusiasm. So whilst Mangham freely acknowledges that Dickens lacked George Eliot’s expansive scientific self-education, he argues that Dickens’s fiction nevertheless reveals the traction which the newly-established forensic science exerted over the national imagination, and by extension, the ways in which the inferences to be drawn from medical observation of living and dead bodies (particularly in autopsies and at coronial inquests) raise questions about “the very nature of how we know things” (3). Are texts (or bodies) “self-interpreting,” or do they require the interpretative work of trained experts? This hermeneutic contradiction characterizes many discursive fields in the nineteenth century – the Bible, for example, was seen by Evangelicals as “self-interpreting,” whilst Broad Churchmen stressed its historicity, and thus its need for translation and glossing. Mangham is certainly right to note that, across the course of the century, the claims of religious revelation increasingly give way to the sense that to ascertain “the facts” on any matter is always the product of human labor. As numerous other critics have noted, this development goes hand in hand with the rise of the professions. Unsurprisingly, doctors and lawyers were...