Charles Dickens's American Audience (review)

Robert McParland's Charles Dickens's American Audience is the most exhaustive treatment we have of the popular reception of Charles Dickens in nineteenth-century America. As such it will likely stand for some time as a significant work of scholarship, one that will, among other things, encourage other scholars and critics to explore further the larger points left underdeveloped in this book. Since Dickens was a unique, and uniquely popular, cultural figure who made two well-publicized visits to the United States in the nineteenth century, the degree of attention paid to him in this book-length study is well merited. Since Dickens was the most popular writer of the age of universal literacy, it is only fair that we hear from a range of voices from across class boundaries testifying to his importance.

The book's great merit is its careful attention to, and ample quotation from, this great range of reactions. It is also unique in situating these responses within a larger claim about how Dickens was made relevant to nineteenth-century American culture at a time when the nation was still engaged in a postcolonial struggle to find its place in the larger world order. In other words, there is an important political subtext to the main argument of this book that has intriguing resonance today. Many Americans, as this book shows, expressed Dickens appreciation in a language of sentiment that drew heavily on his oeuvre. That this practice was widespread throughout nineteenth-century American culture this book leaves no doubt. Yet whether the language of Dickensian sentiment amounted to a widely shared vocabulary responsible for shaping American culture in profound ways, as McParland claims, remains unproven here.

The authors of reception studies often walk a fine line between interpretation and presentation, understandably attempting to avoid overinterpreting, and thus drowning, the feelings and ideas of their sources in order to argue their points. There are some well-known studies of this sort that use their scholarship to support larger historical or polemical claims. Jonathan Rose's massive study of the reading habits of working-class Britons in the Victorian age, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), for instance, seeks to challenge orthodox views that working-class intellectuals nurtured themselves primarily on a diet of popular culture. The greatest weakness of Charles Dickens's American Audience is that it pays insufficient attention to the implications of its larger historical claims. Indeed, some of these larger claims are unfortunately cast in imprecise or equivocal form.

For instance, McParland argues that the evolution of something he calls "American character" can be traced by reading the responses of American readers to Dickens. It is not clear, however, that this large claim can be supported by the evidence he cites in defense of it. What, after all, is "American character," and what role did the popular response to Dickens play in its evolution? Drawing somewhat lightly on a model of imagined nationhood taken from the work of Benedict Anderson, McParland also neglects to fully flesh out of what the American imagined community consists. The evolution of the family reading circle and the growth in literacy undoubtedly contributed to something, but what was it? Indeed, McParland's best chapter, on Civil War-era responses to Dickens, demonstrates that "community" here sometimes means little more than the coexistence in America of irreconcilable pro-slavery and anti-slavery ideological currents. The evidence of profound social division is more evident here than the evidence of unity. Thus, while McParland seems to provide some evidence to support the claim that "consumption and reproduction of Dickens by American audiences shaped the development of American literature and culture," this claim remains too unspecific. It begs the question: what does it mean to "shape" American literature? But he is on even less firm ground when he argues that "the market for Dickens launched imitations, circulated socially shared themes and caricatures, and promoted business. Through shared sentiment and melodrama, it prompted a unifying American...