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6. Dickens’s Laughter School Reading and Democratic Literature, 1870–1940 With only occasional exceptions, democracy, in the records that we have, was until [the nineteenth century] a strongly unfavorable term, and it is only since [the period from the last third of the nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth] that a majority of the political parties and tendencies have united in declaring their belief in it. This is the most striking historical fact. . . . It would sometimes be easier to believe in democracy, or to stand for it, if the [nineteenth-century] change had not happened and it were still an unfavorable or factional term. But that history has occurred, and the range of contemporary sense is its confused and still active record. Raymond Williams, Keywords Through his lifetime, Dickens’s celebrity authorship projected an image of popular democratic literature as a means for readers to generate and share lasting social and aesthetic values that could cut across other social divisions. By featuring characters whose prodigious flights of verbal invention (Sam Weller or Sairy Gamp) or creative entrepreneurship (Venus and Jenny Wren) represent the author’s own powers of invention, Dickens’s serials figure the reading of fiction as a generative reshaping of experience involving a legitimate popular taste as well as individual powers of selection and retention in the memory. By aligning reading and authorship with the everyday work of the poor, popular serial fiction redefines literacy and education as practices of cultural production from the ground up, rather than as vehicles of an undiscriminating mass consumption that needs to be directed by the influence of liberal publications and state schools. Conceived in this way, public art such as Dickens’s novels could directly sponsor the social inclusion of the poor. 270 The School Dickens and Democratic Literature, – 271 Many of the qualities that early readers and critics seem to have found most engaging and original in Dickens’s novels through the 1840s and 1850s, however, would cease to appeal to certain Victorian intellectuals in the decade just before and after his death in 1870—for these critics, the popular appeal of Dickens’s novels and characters indicates their deficiency of intellectual and aesthetic values. I begin this chapter by analyzing how George Eliot and G. H. Lewes attempted to discredit both Dickens’s artistic competence and his modes of appeal to readers by criticizing both the associationism underlying the celebrated ‘‘reality’’ of Dickens’s characters and scenes and his attribution of virtue and sophistication to the poor. By derailing the Dickensian cultural association of popular serial fiction with the egalitarian pleasures of memory, Eliot and Lewes also articulate new scienti fically based formal protocols for realism that could give literature an authoritative standing among emergent disciplines such as psychology and cultural history and distinguish between high and low cultural modes of reception . Eliot’s and Lewes’s objections to Dickens’s influence on readers indicate how closely Dickens’s literary reputation was linked to what I have been characterizing as the democratic cultural politics associated with his version of celebrity authorship. They advocate indirectly for individualized silent reading and marginalize the popular Victorian forms of reception associated with serial fiction, thus helping to launch the modernist critique of mass culture. In the middle section of the chapter, I trace the inclusion of Dickens’s works in British and American school readers and the publication of certain of his novels as stand-alone school texts, showing how, from the 1880s through the 1920s, Dickens’s brand of celebrity authorship and his humanitarian posture were adapted into a canonical version of Dickens’s authorship that personified the English literature curriculum’s function of cultural consolidation . In this way, English as a school subject becomes ‘‘Dickensian,’’ since Dickens’s canonical image seems to personify not just the effects of reading his own novels in the literature classroom but also the effects of the English curriculum more generally within a system of public education meant to train children to practice classroom cooperation and consideration for less fortunate others as models for civic participation. By investigating the selections from Dickens’s works along with prefaces and apparatus that appear in these textbooks designed for use in public schools, I also illuminate the relationship between what I call the ‘‘historical Dickens’’ and the ‘‘school Dickens.’’ The historical Dickens is a recognizably Victorian version constructed by academic scholarship, a category in [3.15.219.217] Project MUSE...

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