In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Dickens and the Pleasures of Memory Much memory, or memory of many things, is called experience. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651) We recollect those relations only of which the registration is incomplete . No one remembers that the object at which he looks has an opposite side; or that a certain modification of the visual impression implies a certain distance; or that the thing he sees moving about is a live animal. To ask a man whether he remembers that the sun shines, that fire burns, that iron is hard, would be a misuse of language. Even the almost fortuitous connections among our experiences, cease to be classed as memories when they have become thoroughly familiar. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology (1855) In the decades following Charles Dickens’s sudden death on June 9, 1870, at the age of fifty-eight, Victorian critics and writers were divided in their judgments of his work. Eulogizing Dickens at Westminster Abbey on June 19, Benjamin Jowett, classical scholar, liberal educational reformer, and soon-to-be-elected master of Balliol College, Oxford, offered a positive summation: ‘‘Works of fiction would be intolerable if they attempted to be sermons directly to instruct us; but indirectly they are great instructors of this world, and we can hardly exaggerate the debt of gratitude which is due to a writer who has let us sympathize with these good, true, sincere, honest English characters of ordinary life, and to laugh at the egotism, the hypocrisy , the false respectability of religious professors and others. . . . He whose loss we now mourn occupied a greater space than any other writer in the minds of Englishmen during the last thirty-five years.’’1 In correlating Dickens ’s influence both with the educational effects of his popular fiction and 1 2 Introduction: Dickens and the Pleasures of Memory with his comic and satirical treatment of the hypocrisy of ‘‘religious professors ,’’ Jowett articulates a standard judgment among Victorians that Dickens ’s works offered a critical affirmation of English culture.2 The terms of Jowett’s praise, as commonplace as they may seem, also provide a basis for my account of the ways that Dickens’s popularity became the vehicle for an extra-institutional and nonpartisan literary reception that also produced an accompanying cultural politics for literature. Jowett’s seemingly generic observations about Dickens’s influence in fact imply a coherent though not highly technically articulated theory of literary reception that gained credibility within an emerging international Anglophone market for serial fiction in the nineteenth century, and that was ultimately adapted to explain how the image of the author works within the literary curriculum to convey the democratic values of a national and even global Anglo-American culture.3 Jowett’s assumptions about the specifically educational impact of Dickens ’s writing raise a central set of questions for my project: What are the sources of the popular belief that reading literature helps people become better citizens by making them more socially aware, just, or humane? If they exist, how would such effects of reading literature be manifested? And to what extent have such expectations functioned not only as rationales for the study of literature within the education system, where literary reading practices and literary values are normally taught, but also as justifications of the egalitarian potentials of modern mass culture? I contend that by establishing the literary value of popular serial fiction, Dickens’s reception played a central role in the way we have learned to read literature as an expression of democratic values within the modern educational system. Jowett’s reference to the way Dickens’s novels ‘‘occupied a greater space than any other writer in the minds of Englishmen’’ draws on a widely accepted conception of the associative memory as a vehicle of collective reception . Jowett’s distinction between the educational and the sermonic registers of fiction also marks quite specifically how Dickens positioned his writing as secular literature to contest the cultural politics of the evangelical movement, particularly the Evangelicals’ strategy to proselytize poor and working-class readers by flooding the market with cheap religious tracts.4 By examining the operative psychological assumptions about the transmission of knowledge and pleasure through reading that underpin contemporary accounts of Dickens’s authorial influence such as Jowett’s, we can understand the history of the popular reception of the serial novel in new ways. In characterizing this associationist theory of the reception of serial [3.17.74.227...

Share