Fortune's Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time (review)

Copiously documented and agreeably written, Elizabeth Campbell's study traces the uses to which Dickens puts the figure of the Wheel of Fortune and related verbal and pictorial concepts throughout his fiction, giving special emphasis to his three "'women's' novels" (xxi): Dombey and Son, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit. She sees "Dickens's representation of Fortune and his wheel imagery" as revealing "an actual revolution in his thinking about historical time: from faith in a linear, progressive, 'masculine' time to a belief in a more fatalistic, cyclical time that could be construed ... as 'feminine'" (3), a change that culminates in Great Expectations.

Campbell devotes most of her long introductory chapter to a historical survey of how Fortune was viewed from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, incorporating in her account the contributions of a number of authors and artists and of emblem books and popular literature to what had become by Dickens's time a widely disseminated tradition on which nineteenth-century imaginative writers were able to draw freely. In keeping with her thesis, Campbell organizes the rest of her book in a "cyclical," seasonal pattern, from "Spring 1840–1849," through "Summer 1850–1853" and "Fall 1854–1859," to "Winter 1860." (What happens in Dickens's oeuvre after that, with Our Mutual Friend and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, is left unresolved.)

The periodicals Dickens edited, in which a number of his novels first appeared, play only tangential roles in Campbell's account, but there is a sense in which serialization forms a central part of her argument. That frequent Victorian mode of publication "affected the patterns of writerly production and readerly expectation and consumption in ways that integrated congenially with the rhythm of at least middle-class, literate women's lives"; "it was," therefore, "especially adaptable to the sympathetic treatment of women's time in its various manifestations" (87). Dualities loom large in Fortune's Wheel – not only between masculine time and feminine time, but also between clashing perceptions of Fortune herself. Campbell does not shy away from pointing out that such easy dichotomies have a way of breaking down, just as the wheels of that early-Victorian icon the railway revolve on their axles and move trains forward.

In these days of slipshod writing and copy-editing, it is a pleasure to come across a book as well produced as Fortune's Wheel. The errors it contains are few and trivial. Some of the illustrations displayed between pp. 155 and 157 are difficult to make out, but it is better to have them that way than not at all. In short, Elizabeth Campbell and her publisher are to be congratulated on what they have achieved in this valuable study.