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  • Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination
  • Ian Haywood (bio)
Sally Ledger , Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. xii + 295, $90 cloth.

"The whole powerful middle class of this country, newly smitten with a sense of self-reproach . . . is ready to join them. The utmost power of the press is ready to assist them. But the movement, to be irresistible, must originate with themselves, the suffering many" (217). These are the trenchant, even incendiary, sentiments with which Charles Dickens addressed "the people" from the leader column of Household Words in October 1854, and the resemblance to the platform oratory of Chartist firebrands is both striking and significant. Outraged by the military and administrative competence of the Crimean War, frustrated by the circumlocutory inertia of aristocratic government, emboldened by the commercial success of his [End Page 339] latest "industrial" novel Hard Times—the first of his full-length fictions to look at the "condition of England" in contemporary terms—Dickens by the mid-1850s seemed to have achieved a preeminent position of cultural power: he was both Britain's leading novelist and (more importantly for this study) the proprietor of a popular weekly magazine which exerted a cross-class appeal and which provided a platform for campaigning social and political journalism.

If the late Sally Ledger is correct that this intervention marked Dickens's most radical mobilization of the popular press, her claim is also the climax of her book's central argument: that Dickens modelled his cultural aspirations on the period of Regency popular radicalism into which he was born, and that this ambition reached its fruition in the mid-1850s, when he finally produced an effective (if not as commercially prolific) alternative to the phenomenally successful George W. M. Reynolds, the maverick Chartist leader and one of the founders (with Edward Lloyd) of the mass-circulation cheap press. Regency popular radicalism was such a yardstick for Dickens because its chief exponents, William Hone and George Cruikshank, combined ferocious criticism of the unreformed political system with commercial success. For Dickens, this ability to harness the dynamism of the literary marketplace to critique the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and corrupt governance was an ideal of how to be truly "popular": the "people" who formed his print constituency resembled the socially diverse oppositional majority of the old radical analysis, and Dickens's achievement was to maintain this broad appeal at a time when definitions of both "the people" and the "popular" became more associated with the working classes and therefore with either political revolution or cultural debasement. By resisting this tendency, Dickens could avoid both explicit political affiliation and rabid populism. Dickens also found that the aesthetic tools of his Regency forebears—primarily satire and melodrama—chimed in with own comic and sentimental talents.

In essence, Ledger's achievement in this book is to re-radicalize Dickens, to return him to his "correct" position as a writer who was constantly negotiating and appropriating radical discourses by sieving popular culture for its most useful effects. Ledger's approach is to show that at key stages in his career Dickens was deeply engaged with these issues at the level of print culture, and the originality and the success of this book comes from the extent to which Ledger has identified new sources behind Dickens's own "popular radical imagination" and his goal of becoming the supreme tribune of the Victorian popular press. On the whole, I think the book makes a convincing case that the importance of the popular-radical "tradition" for Dickens has been underestimated by critics, though as in any revisionist study of this kind there is perhaps a tendency to overstate the [End Page 340] argument. Although the whole of chapter 1 is devoted to outlining Hone and Cruikshank's most famous satires, it is only in chapter 2 that Hone's trials for blasphemy (for which he was acquitted) are posited as models for the breach of promise trial scene in Pickwick Papers. The evidence for this is that Hone's trials were constantly disrupted by carnivalesque laughter, but the only other corroborative evidence for Pickwick's trial being a "replay" (49...

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