Dickens and Mass Culture (review)

Charles Dickens, Disney, Barbie, Madonna: in Dickens and Mass Culture, Juliet John presents us with a crackling continuum of cultural entrepreneurs and many questions about branding, commercial culture, mass reading publics, and celebrity. Dickens and Mass Culture also makes me wonder what "Dickens" meant and what he (or it) means to those of us who have read lots of him and to those of us who know his work at a remove. His celebrity—his brand, if you will (and I don't know that I will)—makes questions about reading, literacy, and knowledge resonate from the nineteenth century, when poor readers largely had access to Dickens through plagiarisms like Oliver Twiss (1841) and non-readers could listen to Dickens read aloud by their employers, tavern-keepers, or tea-shop owners, to the present, when non-readers can rent Oliver! (1968) from Netflix, watch the Masterpiece Theater Our Mutual Friend (1999), or visit Dickens World. What is Dickens? Dickens and Mass Culture asks this question in terms of print, public readings, film, the theme park, and the market.

The title of this book is confusing, even misleading. Although Dickens used the words "mass" and "masses," he didn't use the phrase "mass culture" because "mass" used as an adjective—as in mass appeal, hysteria, propaganda, and public—is a twentieth-century formulation. John's smoothing over of this problem suggests an alternate title: "Dickens himself uses the terms 'mass' and 'masses' prominently in his early writings on America, and on his first visit to the States, he is centrally concerned with mass culture understood as commercial market-driven culture" (76). Dickens and Commercial Culture would have been a better title for this book, as it better identifies Dickens's concern; Dickens is a possible avatar of Barbie, then, but not of Theodor Adorno or Max Horkheimer.

Indeed, Victorian culture becomes "massified," to use Sally Ledger's terminology from Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination ([Cambridge, 2007] 143), but there are continuing tensions and efforts associated with defining and categorizing popular, radical, and elegant entertainments, literary and otherwise. In Ledger's book, which one cannot help comparing to Dickens and Mass Culture, she works through these categories, carefully delineating the audiences, effects, and changes occurring in the middle of the century and placing Dickens in a rich historical context of radical publishing. John, on the other hand, gives us Dickens almost entirely in his own words, which are treated as though they are transparent. His varying feelings toward his readers, auditors, and other consumers of his work in plagiarized and popularized forms lead John to describe Dickens as at one and the same time utopian and commercial, humanitarian and profit-driven, charitable and misanthropic. A new kind of celebrity, he had to learn how to deal with the mob, the crowd, and the public, as he variously experienced his loving readers; in John's description of his responses, his values clash, collide, and otherwise behave like errant motor vehicles. But these contradictory feelings are not analyzed in any rigorous way.

The worst mob was in America, where Dickens found his fans so suffocating that he had to retreat to Harvard and the "enlightened" company of its faculty (86). American fans instigated in Dickens a "repressed, subterranean rage against the kind of mass culture [he] perceived there and a yearning for a culture that somehow transcends the market" (87). This description is odd since John gives us plenty of evidence that Dickens repressed very little of his rage against mass culture; it may also be that his rage against American culture was connected to the fact that he was not collecting royalties there. To see the floods of fans and then receive money for his readings, but not for his texts, must have been painful to a man whom John represents as enamored of money in a physical way: Dickens wrote, "the manager is always going about with an immense bundle that looks like a sofa-cushion, but...