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Reviewed by:
  • The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe ed. by Michael Hollington
  • John Bowen (bio)
The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe, edited by Michael Hollington; pp. xliii + 703. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, £200.00, $300.00.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this extraordinary two-volume collection that charts the reception of Charles Dickens in Europe. Its innocent-sounding title covers a huge array of material, including not just translations and criticism of Dickens but also theater, film, and television adaptations. And it does so in many languages, over nearly two centuries, across a whole continent, in some twenty-seven countries in which Dickens has found readers, from Iceland to Greece, from Portugal to Georgia. The range of those who read and responded to Dickens during his lifetime and beyond was immense, from Gustave Flaubert and Fyodor Dostoevsky to the obscure, often anonymous, hacks who first carried Dickens’s work into Hungarian or Polish. This study makes the range of reference of much contemporary Dickens studies (and literary debate more generally) look alarmingly provincial in its timespan and shamelessly monoglot. The two volumes’ historical range is as wide as its geographic and linguistic span, and we see Dickens’s texts and reputation being restlessly made and remade in the radically changing cultures and polities of the last century and a half. Much of the mapping that the book carries out is of new or well-hidden material; previous accounts of Dickens’s critical reception were much more partial, outdated, or selective in their range. This is unsurprising, as no single scholar could command more than a fraction of the polylingual skills and range of reference needed to capture Dickens’s remarkable portability. Much praise is due then to the general editor Michael Hollington who has recruited and marshalled a large team of national specialists who between them cover all of Europe outside of Great Britain and Ireland. The result of their labors is an indispensable reference book, which both records and analyzes—often for the first time—Dickens’s part in the fast-moving, multilingual print culture of modern Europe.

The book moves, naturally enough, at a fairly brisk pace; Germany, France, Italy, and Spain (with Portugal) are surveyed in three or four chapters each, while other countries are confined to a single one. Thousands of editions, translations, and critical articles are recorded, often from recherché sources, to provide an indispensable [End Page 553] platform on which future comparative work can be built. Dickens seems to get into every European language in the period, and his work is framed and reframed by French realists and Soviet ideologues, by poets and filmmakers, and by pedagogues and chancers by the score. As sentimentalist, humanist, humorist, or modernist, the Dickens we encounter here seems even more radically protean than we could have thought, a mass of instabilities of title and text. Who would have imagined, for example, that there would be seven different Finnish translations of A Christmas Carol (1843), all bearing different titles, or that the same book could appear in a Bulgarian translation (from Russian) entitled Glorious Resurrection or a Tale of Easter (1860)?

It would be easy simply to celebrate this remarkable diversity of Dickens’s readers in Europe, but they were often deeply wrong-headed, often sentimentalizing or partial, often willing to allow political allegiances or critical controversies to divert or determine their reading. Their Dickens canons are thus very different from the dominant Anglophone ones, more selectively centered, usually on a relatively small number of texts, particularly A Christmas Carol, some early sketches, and The Pickwick Papers (1836–37). Dickens is seen frequently as a children’s author, and a cozier, less disturbing writer than he manifestly is: there is more than enough evidence here to support Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) that interpretation consists essentially of “forcing, adjusting, abbreviating, omitting, padding, inventing, [and] falsifying” (On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [Vintage, 1967], 151). This is often simply a result of poor translation, that difficult, underappreciated, and badly underpaid art. The cultural knowledge and linguistic...

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