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Reviewed by:
  • Dickens and the Imagined Child ed. by Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters
  • Claire Wood
Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters, eds. Dickens and the Imagined Child. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. xv + 210. $105.95; £60.

The title of Peter Merchant’s and Catherine Waters’s new edited collection, Dickens and the Imagined Child, is rich in possibilities. As Malcolm Andrews reminds us in the foreword, “childhood” is an adult construction and thus to some extent is always imagined: memory, invention and contemporary circumstance shape the “imagined child.” Focusing on the role of imagination distinguishes this book from other investigations of Dickens and childhood, providing a theme that is capacious enough to enable diverse exploration while allowing some cohesion. Twelve essays from contributors across the world address different aspects of this theme, from the function of the child and childhood within Dickens’s imagination, to the influence of his portrayals on the imaginings of others. The collection celebrates the bright spots in Dickens’s imagination in addition to probing its darker side, and is informed by biographical, historical, psychoanalytic and close textual readings.

The volume emerged from the Chatham and Rochester leg of the bicentenary travelling conference, “A Tale of Four Cities: Dickens and the Idea of ‘The Dickensian’.” Convened in the place where Dickens spent his early years, this meeting was dedicated to the theme of childhood, encompassing shifting narrative perspectives, childhood stories, and the role of memory and auto/biography. The collection is marked by this provenance in several ways: in the eclecticism of the contributions generally and Jane Avner’s piece on “A Medway Childhood” specifically; and more diffusively in its energetic and often joyful spirit, reflecting the tone of bicentenary celebrations. This is captured in the editors’ introduction, which also serves to demonstrate how the book differs from other recent work on childhood. Rather than opening with lengthy explanations of childhood in the nineteenth century and the social and cultural contexts that might inform Dickens’s deliberations, Merchant and Waters use a series of vignettes to bring different aspects of the author’s complex conception to life: Sissy Jupe represents the “holy idiocy” of some child figures; adolescent Georgiana Podsnap takes “occasional frosty peeps out of childhood into womanhood” [End Page 317] (qtd. 4), suspended between the innocence of childhood and adult knowledge; young Pip is portrayed as both perceiving subject and object of contemplation. Each vivid example is linked to where the idea receives further attention in the volume – a pleasingly light-handed approach that celebrates the range and richness of Dickens’s writing, instead of squaring up against current critical debates. This is not to say that individual essays avoid engaging in these debates, but rather that as a whole the volume is more interested in enlarging the scope of studies of Dickens and childhood through the focus on imagination, rather than putting forward a strong overarching polemic.

The book is divided into three, with sections dedicated to Dickens’s portrayal of child figures, the relationship between childhood and memory, and childhood experiences of reading and writing. The first section explores the “Dickensian Child.” Much has been written about this subject, as a cursory glance at the contents list of Laura Peters’ critical anthology Dickens and Childhood (Ashgate, 2012) indicates. It is thus refreshing to find essays that approach the topic from unexpected angles and make us think harder about what we’ve come to assume about this figure. Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s beautifully observed exploration of the “Knowing Child” makes a strong start. Her contention is that because childhood is defined by its abnormality in Dickens’s works, children are forced to “play” at being children: despite perceiving the faults of the adults responsible for their welfare, Dickensian children dissemble this knowledge to avoid disrupting notions of childhood innocence and dependency. However, this latent knowledge contributes to the uncanny, time-warped figuration of characters such as Paul Dombey. It also inhibits normal development: instead of growing up, the Dickensian child “moves on” (13). Galia Benziman’s piece on blank identities in early Dickens is another highlight in this section. Benziman challenges the view that Dickens’s early work lacks political sophistication because of...

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