The Curious World of Dickens by Clive Hurst and Violet Moller, and: Charles Dickens's Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman (review)

Charles Dickens had an uncanny way of writing everyday life into his novels, and Hurst and Moller's beautifully illustrated book as well as Grossman's exciting monograph show how integral Dickens's everyday world was to the creation of his texts.

Written for the bicentenary of Dickens's birth, Hurst and Moller's The Curious World of Dickens aims to illustrate the "relationship between the fictional worlds that Charles Dickens created in his novels and the historical reality in which he lived" (8). Each of the eleven chapters presents a different aspect of Dickens's "curious world." The authors provide a brief introduction, apt quotations from Dickens's letters and novels, and full-color photographs and descriptions of related objects, from 1830s maps of London and playbills listing Dickens as an actor to food labels and advertisements for London amusements.

Hurst and Moller's book is, at its base, a vehicle used to showcase the varied holdings of the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera in the Bodleian Library. The color photographs are certainly eye-catching, but readers hoping to study the plates in detail may be disappointed by their small size and sometimes tiny print. Likewise, the item descriptions are usually helpful, though occasionally the reader will desire meatier information. Finally, the intended reader is unclear. The introduction seems intended for readers unfamiliar with Dickens, but the content of the book surely must be aimed at those interested in nineteenth-century objects and in Dickens specifically. Nevertheless, Hurst and Moller provide an interesting and tactile look at the intersections between Dickens's literary world and the everyday world in which he lived.

In Charles Dickens's Networks, Grossman focuses on another aspect of Dickens's everyday life: modes of transportation. He argues that the increasing systemization of public transportation provides the underlying structure for The Pickwick Papers, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Little Dorrit and demarcates three successive phases of Dickens's understanding of the transportation revolution. The Pickwick Papers highlights the thrill of a community connected by shared transportation routes; The Old Curiosity Shop notes the tragedy of alienation from the community when one is not "gridded in"; and Little Dorrit reveals the broadening perspective of international travel that reveals—often hazily and only after the fact—our connections to each other.

Throughout the book, Grossman is energetic and perceptive; his copious quotations from each text and his interpretations of original illustrations provide a strong foundation for his persuasive argument. His use of original serial publications is especially important to his reading of The Old Curiosity Shop—a tale that Master Humphrey relates to the Pickwick Club in Master Humphrey's Clock. His insightful and rare treatment of the novel within this larger framework effectively links The Pickwick Papers and The Old Curiosity Shop while convincingly highlighting the implications of an evolving public transportation system.

Grossman's monograph will fascinate and engage Dickens scholars; his afterword opens the door for all nineteenth-century scholars to discover the ways in which the public transport revolution integrally affected the texts of other writers and to understand the "world in the age of passenger transport networks" (216).