Dickens and the Myth of the Reader by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton (review)

What is an inimitable writer to do, when no reader’s imagination is sufficiently up to scratch to follow along in his every imaginative step? Charles Dickens, as Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton puts it succinctly in the final sentence of Dickens and the Myth of the Reader, simply became “his own ideal reader” (176). This suggestive monograph collects extensive evidence from Dickens’s letters and novels to show how pervasively the Inimitable appears to invite his readers to imagine for themselves, while at the same time insisting on providing what they will see. Recognizing similar gestures throughout his fiction, journalism, and correspondence, the book finds in Dickens’s claims to an intimate relationship with his reading public a kind of rhetorical puppet show, one in which Dickens acts out both the reader’s and writer’s parts. Based on Oulton’s account, critics should have little need to puzzle over which reader—whether implied, ideal, or historical—is being invoked within Dickens’s work. Invariably, the myth of the reader collapses to reveal Dickens himself.

Oulton’s book is admirably thorough, which is no small feat given the vast task of combing through Dickens’s writing across several genres in order to bring together his many references to the mental and physical acts of writing and reading. The collected evidence by itself makes a persuasive case that a “sustained engagement with reader response” proved “a key feature of Dickens’ narrative method”—in both his personal and professional writings—throughout his career (61). Beginning with one chapter focused on Dickens’s early writings, the book concentrates on the novels and letters from David Copperfield (1849–50) on. Reading and writing are broad categories that encompass innumerable examples, and as the book progresses, the scene of reading fades out and the focus shifts toward letters and documents. What fades for Dickens, Oulton shows, is his initial optimism about “creating and educating readers” (31): the later novels are filled with “the falsification, appropriation, or misappropriation of personal letters and other documents” and the author’s questions about the reliability of the written word (31, 136).

It is unsurprising to find that Dickens is bossy, that he “sets out the terms of his relationship with readers within the written text” (26). Fortunately, in identifying a range of rhetorical strategies Dickens uses across the novels and letters, Oulton also nuances this truism by showing the controlling novelist caught in an imaginative dilemma. Oulton’s Dickens walks an authorial tight-rope in wanting to stimulate his readers to embrace his characters and give them life “out of and beyond the text in which they first appear,” yet still control the representation of their stories (59). She shows Dickens repeatedly “urging his readers to imagine freely for themselves” even as “he has himself already decided what they will see” (39). A similar anxiety about what an autonomous reader might do with the material he provides characterizes Dickens’s use of first-person narrators, particularly in the autobiographical David Copperfield. Oulton illustrates the ways in which Dickens expressed “ambivalence about revealing details of his life” in the autobiographical fragment he wrote at this time, while also insisting on “imaginative work as a reflection of character” (85, 86). Consistently and clearly, the book portrays Dickens’s seeming interest in the reader’s independent imagination as, in actuality, self-interest, as vital to constructing and asserting his authorial persona. The book is less about the experience of reading Dickens than the title seems to suggest, and it instead traces, step by rhetorical step, the ways in which Dickens sought to create a myth of himself in the reader’s eyes, “a figure who is knowable in theory but never seen in practice” (108). While not offering a very different image from the familiar one of Dickens manipulating readers’ emotions through suspense and sentiment, the book explicates with detailed insight each...