Dickens's Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality, and: Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (review)

What's a literary critic to do in the face of Dickensian charm? The most (take your pick) beguiling or irritating feature of the Inimitable's work never becomes an overt subject for either Chris Louttit or Holly Furneaux, but together their very different books suggest that any attempt to grapple with Charles Dickens's historical and literary significance needs to start with what is so unmissable about his work: its nearly pathological abundance of energy, humor, and warmth. Where recent criticism has tended to distrust Dickensian "magic"—most often reading it as ideological fairy dust—Louttit and Furneaux are disarmingly willing to be delighted by their author. But in each case a certain manic intensity in Dickens's writing tends to escape critical attention, and one is left wondering if we might cultivate reactions to Dickensian charm aside from surrender or suspicion.

Louttit's book, which examines the ways in which work is inscribed on the bodies and in the personalities of Dickensian characters, is somewhat misleadingly titled. In his introduction Louttit claims that Dickens's "writing about work is . . . best viewed not merely as a muffled echo of a quasi-religious gospel of work, nor as an objective sociological report, but rather as a secular gospel" (5). Louttit never says exactly what he means by a "secular gospel," and the eminently reasonable novelist who emerges from this study does not seem a believer in any gospel, secular or otherwise. Rather, Louttit claims that Dickens "does not only confirm dominant middle-class values ascribing the benefits of purpose and hard graft, but also sympathizes with those suffering the human costs of hard work" (5). The claim is not startling, but Louttit pursues it exhaustively and, in places, imaginatively. An early chapter links Dickens's habits of characterization to the tradition of urban proto-ethnography embodied in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor (1851-62) and the 1840s "occupational sketches" of Douglas Jerrold and Leigh Hunt (12); Louttit defends Dickens from the charge of Forsterian flatness by demonstrating that despite similarities to these writers, Dickensian characterization works by first comically reducing human personalities to occupational type and then showing how character inevitably exceeds such reduction. Subsequent chapters analyze Dickens's representations of working women, professional impersonality, and male idleness. In each case, Louttit finds Dickens's attitude is one of ambivalence: hence Louttit argues that Pleasant Riderhood in Our Mutual Friend (1864-65) is both disparaged for her work as a pawnbroker and respected for her acumen and even her demeanor ("her name . . . is not entirely ironic" [55]); that while Jaggers in Great Expectations (1860-61) is far from likable, his professional competence means that he "ends up as a character whom Pip, this reader, and perhaps Dickens respect" (88); and that the weirdly indolent Eugene Wrayburn (also from Our Mutual Friend) is a character "in whom idle cynicism and earnestness co-exist" (129).

As these formulations suggest, Louttit's analysis is pitched at the level of character judgment; in places he runs the risk of simply reproducing Dickens's own ambivalence about his more enigmatic creations. Louttit's method yields most interesting results in the chapter on domestic management, in which he reads Esther Summerson's sometimes cloying first-person narration in Bleak House (1852-53) less as Dickens's awkward attempt to propagandize for feminine propriety than a meditation on "the deeper psychological motivations and costs of her devotion to domestic duty" (97). But the analyses don't always achieve this degree of nuance when confronted with Dickensian charm: we are told that certain Dickens scenes are "warmly comic" (33), that despite eccentricities a particular Dickensian character "manages to be genuinely likable" (65), and that Dickens's work constitutes a "playfully imaginative response" to the realities...