Recent Dickens Studies—2015

This article surveys Dickens scholarship in 2015, with attention to more than 170 monographs, collections, book chapters, and journal essays. The scholarship exhibits an increasing interest in intermediality studies (including intertextuality), "things" and "bodies," ethical and moral analyses, and an intensifying revival of formal and textual-aesthetic interests, including treatments of style, mode, voice, characterization, form, and "beauty." The scholarship surveyed is organized into the following categories: General Studies; Bibliographical Studies; Biographical Studies; Ethics; Aesthetics; Modes of Reading; Intermediality; Bodies; Childhood, Adulthood, Family; Environments; Empire; and Neo-Victorianism. It does not include web-based scholarship except for the cluster of articles published in the online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century.

Introduction

"What a long, strange trip it's been!" (if I may quote The Grateful Dead). Tweeting as Mr. Venus's stuffed alligator, mind-modelling Mr. Dick, reading the phrenological charts of Inimitable head and gorilla hand, tracking the "afterlives" of astonishment, Mad-libbing, conjuring, night-walking: Dickens scholarship in 2015 provides a heck of a ride. "Dickens was anything but stupid," says Carolyn Williams, and the outpouring of fascinating studies of his work and life, from every angle conceivable and inconceivable, proves her right (357). The mode of analysis that experienced the greatest infusion of energy in this year was the newly-named field of "intermediality studies" (a new name to me, anyway), which wraps its inclusive arms around studies of adaptation and performance, intertextuality, illustration, translation—really any "remediation" of texts or media in, with, or by other texts or media. This broad field has been distilled and consolidated with the appearance of its own handbook, Gabriele Rippl's Handbook of Intermediality. Intermediality studies inspired the largest share of Dickens scholarship in this survey; moreover, the "Intermediality" section includes studies of every intermedial possibility for Dickens, whether his writings are considered to be "remediating" other texts or media products, or whether other texts or media products are considered to be "remediating" his works.

Assessments of Dickens's ethical analyses, in both systemic and individual dimensions, also claim a large share of Dickensians' attention, with treatments of works dating from his earliest days as court reporter through The Mystery of Edwin Drood, including a Žižekian reading of the legal documents in Bleak House, the unpacking of conflicting Kantian and Levinasian messages in a pair of "sibling" Christmas stories (Sabey 124), and a monograph, Joshua Gooch's The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy, which analyzes the ethics of service work via the theories of Michel Foucault, Nancy Armstrong, Judith Butler, and the autonomist school of neo-Marxism.

"Thing Theory," with its call to "look carefully at rather than through appearances," as Peter Capuano reminds us (11; his emphasis), continues to underwrite studies of all Things Victorian from chair- and railroad-transport to rags recycling to the relic love of Victorian death culture. Two monographs, in fact, unpack the latter, Deborah Lutz's Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture and Claire Wood's Dickens and the Business of Death. This cultural-materialist approach also produced a range of interesting treatments of bodies, packaged in categories both familiar (race, gender, and sexuality) and newish (body parts, bodies as parcels, corpses)—and one intriguing argument that John Rokesmith's Things make his story readable as a response to Uncle Tom's Cabin or a "sequel" to the abolitionism of American Notes (Neel 513).

In response to the growing neo-Victorian oeuvre of global authors "writing back" to Dickens, a sizeable critical literature has appeared that addresses the ways such authors redo Dickens's plots or characters or spaces—or turn Dickens himself into a character—with various post-modern and post-colonial flavors. I would be remiss, too, if I did not mention here a particular "writing-back" to Dickens: Edgar Rosenberg's charming memoir of his "first love affair with Dickens the novelist" and his "first feeble attempts to come to terms with the language in which he wrote," a language he did not begin to learn until he emigrated to the U. S. at age fourteen (219).

Study of purely literary-technical matters is on the rise, as well, headed by Jeremy Tambling's Dickens's Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature of the City and John Harvey's The Poetics of Sight and including treatments of mode, style, voice, characterization, form, and even "beauty," as Michael O'Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton's collection The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns demonstrates. How we or Dickens or his characters read, from cognitive, sociological, or historical points of view, occupies several scholars. Computer-power makes itself felt in studies of corpora and online reading projects and pedagogies—a development telling this twentieth-century analog scholar that we are no longer testing the waters of the twenty-first century: we're in deep.

I have tried to find everything—and to convey the gists and flavors of that everything as accurately as possible. No doubt, on my "long strange trip" I will have missed something or gotten things wrong. My deepest apologies to anyone who has fallen victim to such errors; they were not intentional. I have organized all the works surveyed here into the following sections, many of which have sub-sections of their own: General Studies; Bibliographical Studies; Biographical Studies; Ethics; Aesthetics; Modes of Reading; Intermediality; Bodies; Childhood, Adulthood, Family; Environments; Empire; and Neo-Victorianism. I did not include web-based scholarship, except for a cluster of articles published in the online journal 19.

General Studies

Aiming at a general and student readership, the Stephen Arata, et al. collection A Companion to the English Novel is divided into seven parts. Part 1, "The Novel and Its Histories," includes chapters on important decades in the form's development (1740s, 1790s, 1850s, 1920s, and 2000s); Part 2, "The Novel and Its Genres," includes chapters on "Realism and the Eighteenth-Century Novel," "Romance," "Gothic," "Popular and Mass-Market Fiction," "Experimental Forms," and "The Novel into Film"; Part 3, "The Novel in Pieces," covers different dimensions of the genre, including narration, form, character, and affect; Part 4, "The Novel in Theory," explicates a history of theories of the novel before 1900, from 1900 to 1965, and after 1965; Part 5, "The Novel in Circulation," includes chapters on "Making a Living as an Author," "The Network Novel and How It Unsettled Domestic Fiction," and "Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups"; Part 6, "Geographies of the Novel," includes chapters on "London," "The Provincial Novel," "Intranationalisms," and "Internationalisms"; and Part 7, "The Novel, Public and Private," addresses "The Novel and the Everyday," "The Public Sphere," "The Novel and the Nation," and "World English/World Literature." Alison Booth takes Great Expectations for one of the exemplifying texts in her chapter in Part 3, "Some Versions of Narration." She uses it to illustrate the distinctions among "real author," "implied author," and "narrator," and between "implied" and "real" readers. She also mentions this novel briefly in her discussion of "story" and "discourse."

Nicholas Marsh's Charles Dickens: Hard Times/Bleak House, in Palgrave Macmillan's Analyzing Texts series, is also intended for general readers and students. The book has two parts (as do the other books in this series, which Marsh edits). Part 1 consists of passages from the novels with sample analyses exploring them individually and in contrast to each other. Marsh includes chapters on "Opening Salvos," "Characterization: From Grotesques to Intimates and Women," "Morality and Society," and "Rhetoric, Imagery and Symbol," and concludes with "Summative Discussion and Conclusions" and "Questions." Part 2 contains biographical, contextual, literary historical, and supplementary critical materials with accounts of sample readings by reviewers and critics from Dickens's own time to the present, and concludes with suggestions for further reading.

Bibliographical Studies

Two articles address the stirring discovery by scholar and antiquarian book dealer Jeremy Parrott of a complete set of the twenty-volume first run of All the Year Round that contains penciled in its margins the attributions of authorship for nearly every piece published in the journal. In "The Skeleton out of the Closet: Authorship Identification in Dickens's All the Year Round," Parrott explains how he acquired this set and offers some speculation about how it dropped out of knowledge (sold, he thinks, by Charley Dickens during some financial distress) and about why he thinks the annotator was Dickens himself. He believes the "personal working set," as he calls it, must have been kept in the apartment above the office of All the Year Round (567). Parrott's account of this story is quite moving (I felt I was witnessing the discovery of gold in California), and so it was with a bit of sadness that I turned to Leon Litvack's sober discussion of it in "Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round." Litvack is at pains to say that neither he nor any other expert who has examined the set doubts its authenticity as an "aide mémoire of who wrote what in the journal," possibly kept in Dickens's apartment above the office and possibly sold by Charley or his family, but he does claim, using images of known signatures and writing samples, that the annotations were not made in Dickens's hand (333). He also notes that this discovery "has perhaps raised more questions than it has answered," particularly with regard to authorship attribution of collaboratively written or heavily edited pieces (333). Parrott projects at least two years will be needed for transcription of all the information the set contains, but he aims to complete "a Lohrli-style index of contributors to All the Year Round that would replace Oppenlander's guide" (567).

Michael Slater also brings welcome news in "The Clarendon Dickens Redivivus." Oxford University Press will complete the Clarendon edition of Dickens's works, he reports, (production of which has been suspended since 1997), under the general editorship of David Hewitt, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Aberdeen. (Hewitt is also General Editor of the Edinburgh University Edition of Scott's Waverly novels). Slater reports that the new Clarendon will include all of Dickens's fiction, all journalism collected by Dickens, and all stand-alone nonfiction pieces published in his lifetime, but it will not include plays, poems, scripts for speeches or readings, journalism he didn't collect, letters, or The Life of Grimaldi. The edition will include new features: "explanatory annotation" suitable for beginning Ph.D. candidates and, "where appropriate," a glossary or "a short essay-note on the subject of a topic that pervades the work in question, e.g. Utilitarianism in the case of Hard Times"—or both (265, 266). Sketches by Boz, edited by Paul Schlicke, is the next work scheduled for publication.

In "A Work Definitely Not by Boz," Paul Schlicke and William F. Long discuss a sketch published in newspapers in 1839 that satirizes Lord Melbourne and three "awkward" Parliamentary matters: the Bedchamber Affair, the question of using a secret ballot in Parliament, and "proposals to reform state control and funding of schools" (279). Long and Schlicke supply the text of this sketch and "decode" it with reference to an 1839 cartoon by John Doyle that also satirizes the Bedchamber Affair using a child's game called "Frog in the Middle" (280). (An image is supplied). They explain that the facetious allusion to Dickens in the sketch's title, "The Man Who Couldn't Get Out. A Sketch—Not by Boz," does not imply a parody or imitation of Dickens's work, either in style or content, but simply "reflects the currency of that famous pseudonym" at a time when Sketches, Oliver Twist, and Nicholas Nickleby were freshly in the public eye (282).

Biographical Studies

"At Home and Astray"

I take my title for this section from Philip Howell's monograph At Home and Astray: The Domestic Dog in Victorian Britain because I like the possibilities inherent in it: one can be "astray" while at home or "at home" while abroad—or, of course, at home while at home and astray while abroad. All of these conditions get applied to Dickens in the studies covered here, which address themselves in one way or another to his travels either at home in London or abroad in other nations. Howell's study itself, however, is launched by a reading of Dickens as an apparent lover of dogs; thus, I class it as a look at Dickens at home while at home. Howell's interest in the "animal turn" in his field of geography takes him to nineteenth-century London, where what he calls "the dog question" (23)—"where dogs should be and how they (and their human companions) should behave"—becomes a public issue for the first time (22; Howell's emphasis). Howell begins with a chapter on Dickens's feelings about dogs because of the ways he seems representative of Victorian attitudes regarding this "dog question."

Dickens appears to hold opposite and competing attitudes about dogs, which Howell maps onto the novelist's love of the melodrama, which is associated with the cult of domesticity, and of the pantomime, whose "hurly-burly" energies express the "desires" and "nightmares" of the Victorian metropolis (45). Thus, one Dickens "delights in the bustling vitality and animality of the streets"—with its stray dogs—while another "preaches the quiet domestication of human (and animal) nature"—with its pets (43–44). A reading of Dickens's correspondence recounting the killing of his pet Sultan, who had bitten a child, leads Howell to characterize the attitude that results from these opposing impulses and this incident as "ruthlessly sentimental," one in which "humane sentiment" did not "triumph … over hard-heartedness and hardheadedness" (48). Such triumph is only "a fable of Dickensland," as Chesterton called Victorian England (48).

Matthew Beaumont's Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London presents a Dickens very much "astray" while at home in London. Beaumont's book traces the "evolution … from the figure of the vagrant to that of … the bohemian author" as ideologies and cultural formations shifted from those of medieval to those of Victorian London (9). Dickens, "the great heroic and neurotic nightwalker of the nineteenth century" serves as the culminating representative of Beaumont's series of figures who "achieved a precarious balance between belonging and not belonging, feeling at home and feeling homeless" (6, 11). In his Marxist analysis, the nightwalker figure "helped define the condition of social displacement and spiritual homelessness that is central to our understanding of the everyday experience of capitalist modernity and its representation in art and literature" (11). Beaumont devotes his two last chapters to making this case about Dickens. In the first of these chapters, he examines Dickens as nightwalker in the journalism and letters, demonstrating both the "heroic" and the "neurotic" aspects of this activity. His nightwalking was "both a prescription" for insomnia and writer's block and a "neurotic compulsion," and it put him in the company of "the victims of unemployment, alcoholism and other symptoms of social and spiritual alienation" (365, 366). These encounters cause him to conclude dark things about "the 'demented disciples' of political economy" (368, quoting Dickens's "Night Walks"). This chapter concludes with a discussion of the encounter the Uncommercial Traveller has with the impoverished youth who flees his touch (recounted in "Nightwalks"), an encounter in which, Beaumont states, Dickens confronts "the limits of his own capacity for identifying with the poor" (371), a "conflicted and self-divided" attitude not shared by other philanthropists of the time who are by comparison more aggressively "philanthropic" (372).

Beaumont's second Dickens chapter teases out the implications of the opening encounter between nightwalker Master Humphrey and Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop. He claims that a fuller understanding of the nightwalker figure allows us to discern in this scene "an alternative introduction to the novel, and, in a sense, the introduction to an alternative novel," one he suggests might be called (after James Joyce) "The Old Cupiosity Shape," given the "hidden channels of desire" it suggests (382). Finding similar dark energies sweeping into other novels with their nightwalker figures (Barnaby Rudge's father, Sydney Carton), Beaumont, quoting Walter Benjamin's "A Berlin Chronicle" (1997), concludes that, Dickens perceived that at night "'the places are countless in the great cities where one stands on the edge of the void', and where prostitutes, and derelicts of one kind and another, are like the household gods and goddesses of 'this cult of nothingness'" (400).

Two studies present Dickens more at home in London. The first, Leon Litvack's "Dickens at Furnival's Inn: New Evidence of a Sub-Letting Agreement," brings to light a sub-letting agreement between Dickens and one Charles Capron. This sublet, Litvack says, allowed Dickens to move into 48 Doughty Street with his growing family before his lease at 15 Furnival's Inn was finished. The article contains images of both the floor plan of Furnival's Inn and the sub-letting contract signed by Dickens.

The second, Ged Pope's chapter on Dickens in Reading London's Suburbs: From Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith, presents the author as explorer of the London suburbs, urban spaces that Pope sees as producing a number of anxieties, since such locations "lack meaningful connection to a locality or landscape," are "devoid of cultural or familial continuity," and are "domestic, withdrawn and private," all traits that make them seem unreadable and unknowable (2). Two types of literary representations attempted to guide their middle-class readership through these spaces, the silver-fork novel and the literary sketch. Sketches by Boz, Pope's example of the latter form, present the suburbs "in a reassuring way": "close enough to see but safely remote" (31–32). Boz produces this effect via a persona who "is at pains to be at home nowhere and yet everywhere" and who delineates the suburbs as two-dimensional spaces whose surface signs have no depth of reference (33). Boz's sketches, Pope concludes, initiate a general view of suburbia that persists today, including the sense of what this illegible, invisible suburban life feels like "in the absence of verifiable, seen knowledge" (41).

If Pope's study presents a Boz who seems "at home" at home and Beaumont's a nighwalking Dickens going "astray" while at home, Stephen Miller's Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole gives us a Dickens at home while abroad. Explaining that Dickens writes his chapter on New York City in American Notes as though he is "a guide leading a walking tour of Lower Manhattan," Miller takes us on a survey of our Dickensian tour guide's experiences (15). Miller's modus operandi is to use a quotation from Dickens's observations as a springboard for recounting the histories or contexts of the buildings, streets, and other New York objects and people described in the passage. The account gives us a slice of Victorian-era New York through Dickens's eyes, but the aim of the chapter is more to inform us about the city and its micro-histories than to tell us about Dickens himself.

Diana C. Archibald and Joel J. Brattin's collection Dickens and Massachusetts also presents Dickens as more at home while in the U.S. than is usually thought because of his positive responses to Massachusetts. The book is divided into two parts, the first of which reproduces the images and full master narrative of the Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation Bicentenary Exhibition mounted at the National Historical Park in Lowell, Massachusetts from March 30 to September 20, 2012, with additional information that was left out of the exhibition. (The editors invite readers to visit a virtual tour of the exhibition at http://library.um/edu/dickens/exhibit/virtualtour.html.) This narrative claims that "[a]fter this transatlantic visit his [Dickens's] writing demonstrated a new vigor and complexity and a heightened social consciousness," and the account also is full of interesting tidbits (14). For example, the suggestion that Dickens's "negative portrait of transatlantic travel in the second chapter of American Notes proved so powerful that Cunard [the steamship company] strove for generations to overcome the unfavorable image Boz had bestowed on the company" is accompanied by images of Cunard's advertisements (32). We learn, too, that Worcester phrenologist Lorenzo Niles Fowler found Dickens's "peculiar phrenological developments" to be "Casuality, Mirthfulness, Ideality, Approbativeness, Imitation, and Language," and we are given an image of Fowler's chart of Dickens's head (qtd. on 69). My favorite images, however, are those of the "pen photographs" of Dickens's readings taken by Kate Field, daughter of actor and playwright Joe Field, at the Tremont Theatre in 1842 (85). These seem wonderfully to capture intonation and pace in the placement of words on the page; looking at them, one can imagine easily the way he must have delivered the passages in performance.

The second part of the collection contains essays that address some effects on Dickens's thinking or writing of different encounters or experiences he had in Massachusetts. Two of these take up the impact of his visit to the Lowell Mill, "Dickens, the Lowell Mill Girls and the Making of A Christmas Carol," by Natalie McKnight and Chelsea Bray, and "Visions of Lowell, Light and Dark, in Our Mutual Friend," by André DeCuir. McKnight and Bray contend that several of the stories Dickens read in The Lowell Offering, the mill girls' literary magazine, suggested "images, narrative structures, themes, and phrasings" along with "a stream of thoughts and feelings that came to fruition in the Carol," which he wrote in the year after returning to England (103). DeCuir examines a different kind of impact, claiming that Dickens calls upon an idealized memory of the Lowell Mill to create Our Mutual Friend's Plashwater Weir Mill, where Lizzie Hexam finds employment. Bradley Headstone's presence in this setting highlights his violent rage, and so the novel "throws into stark relief … the polluting 'defilements' that come not from factory runoff but from … the fragile and potentially dangerous human psyche" (120–21).

Diana C. Archibald's "Dickens's Visit to the Perkins School and 'Dr. Marigold'" argues that Dickens's encounter with the Perkins School, especially its famous deaf-blind student Laura Bridgman, inspired not just the story of a deaf character (the Sophy of "Dr. Marigold"), but also a "radical" portrait of deafness (131). The story, Archibald claims, "helps to contest the definition of disability itself" (131). Sophy marries a deaf man, and the two of them have a hearing child, who, "while hearing, is actually bilingual, easily speaking both languages [speech and signing] without pause," and the story's happy domestic ending "is silent" with characters signing to each other (131).

A more radical Dickens also emerges in Joel J. Brattin's study of the manuscript of American Notes, "Slavery in Dickens's Manuscript of American Notes for General Circulation." (This manuscript is housed in the Forster Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.) Brattin brings to light many passages containing heavy uses of irony, even sarcasm, that were removed before publication, as well as most of the detailed evidence (much of it from abolitionist Theodora D. Weld's 1839 pamphlet American Slavery As It Is) that Dickens had originally included in American Notes. This redacted material, Brattin argues, reveals "Dickens's abhorrence of slavery and his methods of communicating the depth of his feelings" (147).

Iain Crawford's "Dickens, Martineau, and Massachussetts: The Republic They Came to See" concludes that the differences between these two writers' books on America and their contrasting responses to "the industrial community in Lowell, the position of women, education, and the role of the press" demonstrate the depth of Martineau's analysis in contrast to the superficiality of Dickens's emotional responses (180). These differences, he claims, explain their friendship's "untidy end," although the effect on them of their visits was strikingly similar (179): both came away from the U.S. with a profoundly increased sense of the power of the press to shape public thinking. Dickens went on to found Household Words and All the Year Round, Martineau to become "one of the most important leader writers for the Daily News" (193).

Lillian Nayder's "Dickens, Longfellow, and the Village Blacksmith" examines the blacksmith-widower figures of Great Expectations and "The Village Blacksmith" in the context of Dickens's friendship with Longfellow and the two men's marriages. In both works, the blacksmith figure expresses the Victorian idealization of and nostalgia for the pre-industrial craftsman. This nostalgia is felt not only about this figure, but also by him as widower. Both characters however, are "reluctant mourners": the Village Blacksmith because he does not want to reopen his pain, Joe Gargery because his life improves with Mrs. Joe's demise (142). Nayder then reads this emotional complex back onto the authors: "the reluctance to remember a lost wife may measure the pain of loss but can also mark the desire to escape from marriage or the guilt over having done so," since while Dickens "strove to erase his still-living wife from his memory, a grief stricken Longfellow memorialized Fanny" (143, 144).

Kit Polga's "Dickens's Visits to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1842 and 1868" makes as much as it can with very slight materials, but it is almost entirely about the civic improvements Springfield experienced between Dickens's two visits, and the effects of his readings on his audience there, rather than Springfield's effects on Dickens.

If Archibald and Brattin's collection gives us a range of ways to understand Dickens's responses to the U.S., Jonathan Daniel Wells supplies an American response to him in "Charles Dickens, the American South, and the Transatlantic Debate over Slavery." Wells demonstrates that while Dickens's works were as popular among Southern American readers as they were with Northerners, American Notes caused a complex set of reactions among them. While whites in the South were offended by the abolitionist chapters in the book, they agreed with its critique of American materialism. However, they considered the latter a Northern trait rather than a national one and so took offense at being criticized for a quality they did not consider their own. They also found Dickens's anti-slavery stance difficult to square with his anti-capitalist sympathy for the conditions of the (white) laboring classes. They agreed with the anti-capitalism, but considered the institution of slavery more humane because of its paternalism, in contrast to the capitalist system which they believed (as Dickens did) stripped the working classes of dignity and means of basic sustenance. Meanwhile, Wells reports, black abolitionists were very encouraged and pleased with the anti-slavery stance, but then disappointed with Dickens's later mildly critical review of Uncle Tom's Cabin—a disappointment that grew when the author became more conservative about racial matters as he aged.

Mary A. Armstrong also presents a Dickens gone astray while abroad in "Some Thing(s) about Italy: Dickensian Objects, Interiors and Pleasures," although part of her argument includes processes by which the straying imagination creates a home for dizzying arrays of foreign experiences and objects. Armstrong launches her study with an overview of the two common responses to Pictures from Italy: (1) that for a travelogue the work is more attentive to its author's internal processes than to the places and people among which he travels, and (2) that the work seems curiously unfocused because of the cascades of things, sights, and people the author lists at every turn. Armstrong's thesis explaining the simultaneous presence of both kinds of writing in this work is that the internal processes (memory, dream, and reverie) "direct the energy of metonymic flood … back into an inward space" which then produces "new and unexpected textual spaces, including spaces for narrative pleasures," such as the ways the real begins to seem uncanny, sublime, or unreal (147, 145). Two versions of Dickens's traveling persona result: one "agitated, outwardly directed" and one "reflective, internally focused" (147). Noting that the traveling Dickens, as he performs this pair of personae, tends to elide interactions with other people, Armstrong observes that this "ongoing performance of privacy" (150; Armstrong's emphasis) keeps the "focus and pleasure where the text both wants and needs them to be: inside" (151). Her conclusion demonstrates Dickens's roots in Romanticism: "The objects of Pictures from Italy—rendered through external details but organized and enjoyed through internal processes—become mirrors for a subject who finds his greatest delight in looking at himself looking at the world" (151).

Two articles address ways in which Dickens went astray while on his reading tour of England, Ireland, and Scotland in 1858: William F. Long and Paul Schlicke's "Dickens and Orangeism" and Paul Schlicke's "'A Sort of Spoiled Child of the Public': Dickens's Reception in Scotland in 1858." Long and Schlicke bring to light a correspondence between Dickens and one W. H. N. Brennian, who published a letter to Dickens in the Belfast Newsletter during this tour objecting to the way Dickens had described a violent incident involving Orangemen in a Toronto election in American Notes. Long and Schlicke present Dickens's conciliatory reply (in which he engages to revise the passage for the upcoming new edition of the work) and an account of political contexts for both the incident described in American Notes and Mr. Brennian's letter of 1858. Schlicke's article takes us into the Scottish branch of this 1858 tour, reporting on a widespread and furious fracas in the Scottish press immediately preceding and during Dickens's time in that country. The "furore" had two causes: the scandal surrounding Dickens's separation from Catherine and the published self-defenses of it, and his well-known anti-Sabbatarian views (31). Schlicke presents several of these anti-Dickens letters in full and quotes phrases from many others to build a vivid picture of the mess. Both articles affirm, however, that these objections to Dickens's political or domestic entanglements did not dampen enthusiasm for his performances. "Glowing reviews" appeared in all the same newspapers (sometimes even in the same issues), and the tour was "well attended, well received and profitable," as Long and Schlicke say of the Belfast readings (Schlicke 26, Long and Schlicke 147). (Dickens never did revise that passage in American Notes.)

Colleagues, Friends, and Family

Several articles bring to light archival materials regarding Dickens's personal or professional acquaintance. In "Munificence Declined: New Letters about the Guild of Literature and Art," Michael Slater recounts what must have been a frustrating situation for Dickens during this same difficult year of 1858. From a file of unpublished correspondence at Hospitalfield (an estate belonging to "arts-loving Scottish landowner" Patrick Allan Fraser [34]), Slater draws the proposal and subsequent correspondence regarding Fraser's offer to donate a different estate, Hawkesbury Hall, to the Guild of Literature and Art, an organization founded in 1851 by Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, and John Forster, among others. The Hall would serve as "a residential centre for struggling writers and artists" (34). Much legal wrangling ensued, ending with the necessity to decline the offer. Slater supplies text from several previously unpublished letters that help to clarify the allusions regarding this matter in the one or two that have been published in the Pilgrim edition.

Michael Rogers outlines the connections between Trollope and Dickens and their families for this bicentennial year of Trollope's birth in "Anthony Trollope 1815–1882: A Bicentenary Note." He demonstrates that despite Trollope's caricatures of Dickens in some of his writing, the two authors were cordial and became more closely connected by the marriage of Thomas Trollope to Ellen Ternan's sister Fanny and by the friendship between their sons in Australia.

Paul Binding's literary biography Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness devotes several pages to the personal and literary relationship between these two authors.¹ He finds enough correspondence between the David-Emily-Steerforth triangle in David Copperfield and the Antonio-Anunziata-Bernardo triangle in Andersen's The Improvisatore (1835) to claim that the latter must have been a model for the former. When Andersen came to compose his To Be or Not To Be (1857), however, Binding finds the direction of influence to have been reversed, particularly in the early chapters and in the "ebbing" of "vitality" he sees in David Copperfield and in Andersen's later novel, once the boy heroes grow into men (308). In a comparison of the deaths of the Little Match Girl and Jo the crossing-sweep, he argues that the two authors share a vision of urban poverty as "the screen behind which spiritual joy awaits," but that both were nonetheless "outraged by social abuses and cruelties above all because they offended against the whole vision of humanity and its … capacity for fellow feeling" (266, 267). Binding also portrays the two authors' personal relationship from Andersen's side of it with passages from his diaries and letters. These portrayals include vivid impressions of Dickens's sons and of Catherine and demonstrate that Andersen was more aware of the resentment his long stay at Gad's Hill produced than previously thought.

Valerie Browne Lester and Robert L. Patten mark the bicentenary of Hablot K. Browne's birth with "Phiz: A Bicentenary Appreciation." They supply an overview of the artist's life and career, with images and discussion of works that demonstrate his characteristic "figures 'fizzing' in motion, the feeling of space and sound, and a rendering that captured idiosyncracies of face, body and gesture" (207). They demonstrate the ways his rendering adapted to developments in Dickens's style but also failed to "keep up with the times" (215). The essay ends with the sad events of Browne's later years—Dickens's "silent betrayal" in ceasing to work with him and the likely stroke that eventually ended the artist's career (214). Of special interest, therefore, is the final image in the article—the self-portrait in watercolor and gouache completed many years after this illness, which according to Lester and Patton "has all the hallmarks of fine art" (217).

Paul Schlicke and William F. Long tell another tale of a relationship gone sour in "Dickens's Second-Best Scottish Friend: John Thomson Gordon, 1813–65." Gordon, they explain, was a Scottish advocate whom Dickens met at a banquet held in Dickens's honor in Edinburgh in 1841. The relationship lasted until Gordon's death in 1865. Schlicke and Long construct a portrait of his character from local press notices of him in officio and Dickens's correspondence about him with Catherine or his other friends. He seems to have been an amusing companion initially, but one whose traits began to grate on Dickens as the two men aged—Gordon, less than gracefully, it appears. Schlicke and Long speculate that Gordon and his family, not the Hogarths, were the likely source of Dickens's remark to Wilkie Collins that he is "dead sick of the Scottish tongue" (261).

Robert C. Hanna writes about Dickens family theatricals in "Dickens and the Revision of Wilkie Collins's The Storm at the Lighthouse: A Note," deciding that Dickens cut the dialogue of the play by a quarter in order to include time for an enactment of Mark Lemon's farce The Nightingale's Diary in performances at Tavistock House and Camden House in Kensington. Hanna reports that in addition to cutting down the dialogue in the play, Dickens also added a prologue and a song. As part of his research, Hanna conducted "an amateur theatrical reading" of Collins's play "with stage directions implemented in pantomime," allowing time for applause and costume changes, in order to determine that the timing of the evening's program corresponded almost exactly to the times Dickens specified in a letter about it to Angela Burdett-Coutts (24).

Leon Litvack establishes the provenance of a photograph of Dickens and several family members, friends, and dogs shown in tableau vivant style on the lawn in front of the Gad's Hill house in "A Dickens Photographer Identified: Adolphe Naudin." Litvack explains that this photograph appeared as the first image of "Naudin's Portfolio, a series of six small assortments of photographs" of well-known public buildings and homes of famous people accompanied by descriptive text written by Hamilton Hume, the editor of the series (130). He discusses the artistic merits of the photograph (which apparently are few) and the value of understanding the contexts in which photographs are taken (which is great). Quoting Susan Sontag, he contends that photographs, including this one, "are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing" (On Photography [1979]). He reads carefully the placement of the figures relative to each other and the house front, their postures, and their gazes, drawing much information "about the Dickens of Gad's Hill" (138).

Barry Newport takes up Mary Hogarth's death in "The Death of Mary Hogarth: A New Explanation," not in order to discuss its emotional impact on Dickens or its "ramifications in his writings" but rather to speculate on its cause (142). Examining the text of Dickens's descriptions of the death, the doctors' diagnosis, and previous scholarly speculation on the matter, he concludes that her symptoms coincide more closely with those of cerebral hemorrhage caused by "a small swelling on an artery in the brain, called a berry aneurysm" (144) than they do with the original diagnosis of heart failure.

In "Dickens and Godparenting," William F. Long and Paul Schlicke examine accounts of Dickens in the role of godfather to other people's children and a few cases in which friends became godparents to Dickens's own children, in order to understand more fully what "his attitude toward the activity of god-parenting" might have been (101). The article establishes that he undertook the role at least ten times. Ranging through his correspondence, sketches, and fiction, the authors conclude that Dickens seems to have viewed this relationship as a means of expressing or consolidating friendships instead of the religious sponsorship of a child, as laid out in the Book of Common Prayer. The article includes in an appendix the names of all ten attested god-children along with a brief abstract outlining the nature of the relationships Dickens maintained with each child's family.

Source Studies

Two articles examine the blacking factory period of Dickens's childhood as an important source of material for his writings, both autobiographical and fictional. "I don't believe the 'autobiographical fragment,'" Robert L. Patten declares provocatively in the opening of his "Whitewashing the Blacking Factory" (2). Patten explains that Dickensians have been too reductive in making this single fragment the "master key explaining everything Dickens did" (2). Instead, he argues, Dickens generated many different accounts of various moments of his youth, and in order to understand more fully what role this incident played in his development, we must put the fragment "into conversation with other things he composed in the late 1840s about his past, David Copperfield's history, and the beginning of both Dickens's and Copperfield's careers as authors" (2). Patten unpacks this "conversation" in the course of the article, drawing comparisons among David Copperfield, the Christmas Books, essays in The Uncommercial Traveller, letters, the 1847 Preface to the Cheap Edition of Pickwick Papers, and information from Michael Allen's Charles Dickens and the Blacking Factory (2011). Exploring the similarities and discrepancies among the various accounts of his initiation into authorship and the Robert Seymour story, for example, Patten demonstrates that Dickens "shaped the story of his life in various ways for differing constituencies in the late 1840s" (3). At this time, Patten makes clear, Dickens "was wrestling with two related issues: how he himself had become successful, given his traumatic childhood, and how he might present himself to an adoring public as one fully in control of his authorial responsibilities" (17). What emerges is an author who "manages a past trauma so as to go forward, recovered" and who reimagines and reinterprets his past "in unexpected places and ways, sometimes casual, parodic, funny, sometimes still imbued with the 'tragical' content Forster identifies" (19, 20).

In "Dickens and the Blacking Factory Revisited" Toru Sasaki engages in a similar project—not to reassess the meaning of the blacking factory period in our understanding of the shape(s) of Dickens's life, but rather to explore the ways that experience gets refracted into recurring images, phrases, and motifs in his fiction. illustrates the ways certain bits of language that "hark back to his 'blacking days'" signal to one another in Dickens's oeuvre (404), including "the color black," "the jealously guarded secret" (404), "the 'ingenuity of hands'," the "execrable feeling of being observed at work" (406), solitude, "the attic," "dark housetops," and "the lonely, neglected child" who looks out in the dark (408). Sasaki points out the many places where these motifs and images crop up in just about every major novel and several minor works, showing that Dickens was endlessly making "private jokes" about that childhood experience, in as varied a set of tones and moods as Patten describes in his article (417).

Three articles look to courtroom trials that Dickens witnessed or on which he reported in the 1830s for sources of characters, scenes, or socio-political analysis in his fiction. Hugo Bowles's note "Samuel Weller, Fishmonger" adds a cockney fishmonger named Sam Weller, who appeared as a defendant in a case heard at Doctors Commons when Dickens was reporting there in 1829–31, to previous speculation concerning sources for Sam Weller. Bowles suggests that Dickens blended two people, in fact. The first is the man identified by Cuthbert Bede in 1882, a comedian named Samuel Vale who was popular in the 1820s for his aphoristic "whimsical comparisons"—or "Valerisms" (407). Because Vale's scripts were all written in standard English, however, Bowles suggests that Dickens found his cockney model in the fishmonger, whom, Bowles argues, Dickens was likely to have observed in court in early 1831.

William F. Long proposes a second trial as possibly providing source material—or at least a source experience—for Dickens's "memorable trial of Bardell against Pickwick" in "John Hill Powell and the Trial in Pickwick Papers." Long accepts the well-established attribution of ideas for the content of Bardell against Pickwick in the sensational Norton against Melbourne trial of 1836, on which Dickens reported for the Morning Chronicle. However, Long brings to light the proceedings of a trial, also in 1836, in which Dickens actually took part on the witness stand: Powell against Black. This trial involved a set of people and a working milieu with which Dickens was intimately familiar: a newly appointed sub-editor of the Morning Chronicle itself, John Hill Powell, and its long-standing editor, John Black. The trial took place not at Westminster, as had Norton against Melbourne, but rather at the Guildhall—where Bardell against Pickwick is set. Long suggests that "the Norton and Powell trials, coming in quick succession … furnished Dickens with experiences of different sorts that, together, underpinned his resolve to begin … the extended narrative of Pickwick" (127).

William F. Long and Paul Schlicke examine the context of the amusing excommunication cases presented by David Copperfield from his time at Doctors' Commons with Mr. Spenlow and in Boz's sketch "Doctors' Commons" (1836) in "Bumple against Sludberry; or, Dickens Has an Early Encounter with Reform Politics." Long and Schlicke note the similarity between these cases and two actual cases that the young clerk Dickens recorded in shorthand and then transcribed in longhand: Jarman against Bagster and Jarman against Wise, both from 1832. The Jarman cases and others like them, they explain, helped bring about passage of John Cam Hobhouse's Vestries Act, a law that helped parishes do away with traditional select vestries (which were made up of self-selected lifetime members) and replace them with memberships elected annually by the whole parish. Since the vestries were responsible for establishing tax rates for the parishes, as Long and Schlicke point out, "the organization of the parish was … a microcosm of the political system in the country as a whole: a restive body of emerging middle-class citizens in thrall to a self-serving elite, accountable to no-one but themselves" (195). The Vestries Act, they go on to explain, "is now regarded as a significant step towards the establishment of fair and representative local government" (195). It was followed by the 1832 Reform Act, the new Poor Law of 1834, and the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, a "political ferment" in the midst of which worked the young clerk and court reporter Charles Dickens (195). "[W]hy," the authors ask, "did Dickens extract from so memorable and representative an instance of social injustice no more than a titbit of comic absurdity, when its potential as metaphor for root issues of the age was so great?" (195). Their answer is that he had not yet developed the capacity to identify or to engage with such root issues of social injustice, even though he cared so deeply about them.

Ethics

Joachim Frank and Lena Steveker remark in the introductory chapter to their collection Dickens as an Agent of Change that "Dickens, who was initially irritated by isolated faults of the society surrounding him, became ever more dissatisfied with society as a whole" (xiii). Moreover, while he also "clearly reveled in depicting moral idiots, stone cold dummies, and the like," Rae Greiner says in "On Dickensian Stupidity: Response," "it is his interest in intelligent persons' stupidities that most ties Dickens to later philosophy and to Eliot and James" (382). In her remarks, Greiner includes a brief history of the concept of "stupidity," noting a shift that corresponds with the changing scope of Dickens's attitudes towards his society, as noted by Frank and Steveker above. By the middle of the Victorian period, she says, the term had come to signify "incompetence of some kind … often relating to politics," and she identifies two types of "stupidity" (377): individual "dimwittedness" (including the mad foolishness associated with creativity) and the type most often represented in portrayals of oppressive systems: "'intelligent' stupidity," the "severance of mind and heart" (378). In 2015, scholars attending to Dickens's ethical energies have addressed this range, from the "moral idiots" and "stone cold dummies" at an individual level to the most oppressive of intelligently stupid systems that the author tackled especially in his later works.

I have divided this section into "(Un)Ethical Systems" and "Individual Morality" for clarity; however, the two foci cannot always be disentangled neatly, a point Joel J. Brattin makes in "Three Revolutions: Alternate Routes to Social Change in Bleak House." The "three routes" that Brattin understands this novel to trace are scientific or technological revolution "with profound economic and social implications" of the type hoped for by Watt Rouncewell's "Ironmaster" father (and the reason for Watt's being named for James Watt) (19); "organized social and political action, often accompanied by at least an implied threat of violence," of the type feared by Sir Leicester Dedlock (21); and "a gentle and personal revolution of love, social commitment, and social responsibility" of the type Esther Summerson embodies (26). All three types converge, Brattin argues, in Watt Rouncewell, whose name in chapter 48 of the first edition was spelled "Wat." (Brattin supplies an image of this spelling from the edition.) Thus, he asks, is Watt Rouncewell therefore a "spiritual descendant of James Watt, as his father hopes," or "Wat Tyler, as Sir Leicester fears" or "a lover, such as Esther Summerson Woodcourt is?" (29).

(Un)Ethical Systems

In "Belligerent Instruments: The Documentary Violence of Bleak House," Suzanne Daly takes a Žižekian view of Chancery. Her thesis is that Dickens anticipates in his portrayal of Chancery twentieth-century articulations of that form of state-sponsored violation of individuals or cultural groups that Žižek calls "objective violence" (with its two subcategories of "systemic" and "symbolic" violence) in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (2008). Daly also calls upon Rob Nixon's concept of "slow violence" (from Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor [2011]) and Gayatry Spivak's concept of "epistemic violence" (from "Can the Subaltern Speak?" [1988]) for her analysis. The kinds of state imposition these concepts articulate, and especially the documents and ideologies that relay them, she demonstrates, appear neutral but are far from neutral in their effects. Daly traces the articulation of what she prefers most frequently to call "indirect violence" in three interconnected plots that turn on acts of "documentary violence": Tulkinghorn's "persecution" of Lady Dedlock, Smallweed's "crushing of George's resistance," and Richard Carstone's "enchantment" with the Jarndyce case (24). Daly analyzes Dickens's use of both figuration and plotting to evoke this "emergent species of wrongdoing"—"emergent" because not quite fully articulated in the nineteenth century (21). Because "slow violence" is difficult to portray interestingly in a narrative, Dickens gives these three victims individual moral failings that contribute to their entrapment so that each must take some share of the blame for her or his victimization. However, their stories show clearly that "a lack of appropriate restraint or self-mastery … opens the door for a predator" (33). Though this complex sharing of blame weakens the critique of the system, Daly concludes, such contradictions are part of the novel's "dazzling, multiform enactment of indirect violence as a lethal weapon and a pervasive social evil, an indictment countermanded by formal constraints that manifest as an ameliorative reticence to acknowledge the consequences of its own claims" (38).

Norbert Lennartz turns us to Dickens's engagement with Romanticism in "Radical Dickens: Dickens and the Tradition of Romantic Radicalism." He argues that the heroes of the Anglicized version of bildungsromans "challenge, combat, and (sometimes) triumph over institutions, authorities and hierarchies" in ways that invite us to place them in the Romantic tradition of "literary radicalism" (130–31). Oliver Twist, he claims, participates in a Hazlittian level of radical critique; it calls "the very fundament of Victorian society and its entire façade of respectability into question" (131–32). First, it reverses the traditional disposition of bastardy and legitimacy by making the bastard Oliver an innocent hero and the legitimate son Monks a villain, a reversal that shows illegitimacy itself to be "arbitrarily imposed by hostile society" rather than "indigenous" (133). Second, Brownlow expresses "a radical plea for a union of love that challenges moral taboos," and third, Harry Maylie levels class differences to marry Rose, and in his proposal to her "subjects the foundations of Victorian society to a thorough deconstruction" (134). Lennartz turns from Hazlitt to Byron as he shifts his attention from Oliver Twist to David Copperfield. Although the Byronic Steerforth must be "exorcis[ed]" by the novel's end, Lennartz emphasizes the "beautiful tranquility" of his body and the pain with which David must give up "both his Byronic friend and his romantic illusions" (136). David's own wanderings after Dora's death are Childe Harold-like, and Australia becomes an ideal new civilization that offers a refuge to fallen women and is "unencumbered by the clash of ideologies and the supremacy of cant" (137). Such romantic energies, analyses, and images appear in a "subversively paradoxical" relationship with Victorian virtues, Lennartz concludes, so that the "bourgeois worlds" that Dickens creates "are constantly deconstructed by daring depictions of alternative families, redefinitions of social hierarchies and the discovery of topographies in and outside of Victorian Britain that … radically turn Victorian values upside down" (140).

Bert Hornback explicates David Copperfield's radical analysis of "a society that has lost its root values" (52; Hornback's emphasis) in "The World Changing Dickens, Dickens Changing the World." Hornback locates the central expression of this social criticism in Mr. Dick, who sees that the world is mad, and notes that later versions of this radical social vision can be found in Mr. Boythorn of Bleak House, Stephen Blackpool of Hard Times, and "Dickens's addresses to 'my lords and gentlemen and honourable boards' in Our Mutual Friend" (52). These voices express what Hornback claims was the most important trait for "changing the world": "usefulness"—that is, being "ready and willing to work change in this world" (53).

Gill Ballinger uses an economics model to analyze the ethical message of David Copperfield in "Countering the 'contract-bargain': Credit, Debt, and the Moral Economy in David Copperfield." She argues that the economic interdependence of David's acquaintances constitutes a "moral economy" that "does not endorse the concept of the possessive individual" upon which modern economic theory is founded, but instead comes closer to "older systems of exchange" based on gifts and "the obligations these incur" (167). Thus, Micawber becomes an important central figure in the novel who counteracts—or at least contrasts with—Uriah Heep and Steerforth, both of whom "expose the ambivalent energies" the novel attributes to the capitalist system (168). This contrast is clearest in her analysis of Micawber's choice to expose Heep rather than take pay for silence, illustrating the valuation of social and ethical obligations above economic considerations.

In '"The Tremendous Potency of the Small,'" Nancy Aycock Metz draws out of Martin Chuzzlewit an account of the way Dickens seemed to be thinking about individual agency and social change in the period between his first trip to the U. S. and the writing of A Christmas Carol. By Carol, Metz claims, he had figured out how to "make a mark … 'lastingly upon the time' in a "'Sledge hammer' blow" against the grievous social conditions he observed (83, quoting Dickens). How did he reach this point? Metz locates his exploration of human agency in the tensions between two nineteenth-century models of historical process: (1) geological "catastrophism" and the analogous "great-man" theory of history that Dickens "viewed with skepticism," and (2) "uniformitarianism" with its tracing of small causes and effects that assumes, as did Dickens, the persistence of the past into the present and "the operation of identical processes across vast reaches of history" (75). Metz construes Martin and Mark as "would-be 'great-men'" who must learn to live "in ordinary time, among unremarkable people and events" and sees in their development and in Tom's spiritual crisis a recognition of the "limits of individual agency" (77, 80). While the novel exposes the emptiness or deceptions of "grand architectural ambitions," it teaches its readers "the value of small, often unacknowledged deeds of helpfulness or generosity" (80). Still, she concludes, such small gestures "do not finally add up to a solution to 'the Condition of England'" in this novel (82). Dickens had not yet figured out ways "to bring topical, contemporary concerns into the fabric of a narrative reaching outward in time and space, as he did so brilliantly in Carol through the figures of Ignorance and Want" (83).

In "The Cultural Politics of Dickens's Hard Times," Doris Feldman reads this novel as "a symptom of cultural complexity and cultural change" by foregrounding the ways it acknowledges the "complicity between resistance and containment" (166). For example, she contends that Sleary's Circus, in its role as relief or "amuthment," "can paradoxically complement hard work and utilitarian programs" and so serves as a "mechanism of middle-class social control or 'discipline'" (162). The cultural complexity and change that she traces can be found in the multiplying definitions of "culture" itself: "organic" (as in the titles of the three books of the novel), an intellectual habit of mind or state of society, "refinement and artistic achievement" (including the notion of "high" art and "low" entertainment), and finally, late in the century, the anthropological meaning (160). The novel expresses all of these meanings, but Feldman focuses particularly on the way it handles the dialectic of high art and popular entertainment, noting that Dickens "blurs the boundaries" between them when he includes classical mythology and biblical imagery "as further and equally valid sources of fancy" (163). Thus, the novel, as it establishes this "common ground of a 'shared' cultural heritage" can be seen as an "aspect of the modernization" it portrays (163).

Andrea Borunda discovers that Dickens's opposition to Utilitarian philosophy appears in the "mechanical metaphors" that delineate the dehumanizing tendencies of industrialization in "Mechanical Metaphors and the Emotive in Charles Dickens's Hard Times" (1). She assembles her reading from Dickens's reactions to the factory visits he made in the U.K. and the U.S., the anti-Utilitarian fulminations of Thomas Carlyle, and a surprising representation of the author of On Liberty: "[John Stuart] Mill considered the poor a personal affront to the dignity and face of Britain and useful only in the subservience to production" (7). Sissy Jupe, she concludes, is the answer to the condition of Coketown, "light[ing] the way from facts to sentiment and from the plight of reality to wonder" (10).

Daniel Wright argues for a sharper apprehension of the paradox of political fiction (he, too, looks at Hard Times), which attempts "to effect real change from within the cloistered world of the merely fictional" in "Let Them Be: Dickens's Stupid Politics" (341). Wright identifies a means of apprehending this paradox first by unpacking the "language of the impasse of political obstinacy," expressed in James Harthouse's laissez-faire politics and Bounderby's tautologies, in order to "imagine different ways of orienting oneself toward a future that appears forbiddingly inalterable" (347, 339). In his reading, neither the Bounder by-Gradgrind Utilitarianism, Louisa's "vacant and empty 'wondering'" (352), the Sleary "fancy," or Sissy's sympathy provide creative political responses to such a future. Instead, it is the narrator's final address to the reader that provides the "sharp, electric sensitivity to … many possible but imaginary futures" even as it also presents "a stupefied withdrawal from the world" (352). Wright aims to restore to this final address "its vividly paradoxical tension" (353) so that we might "do something creative like interpretation rather than something rote like following a manual or acting upon a political argument" (355).

In "Transparent Lies and the Rearticulation of Agency in Our Mutual Friend," David Kaplin interestingly pairs Lady Tippins and Jenny Wren, both of whom practice the same rhetorical social device, the "transparent lie." Both characters, despite being easily marginalized social misfits, succeed in getting their interlocutors to collude with them in their pretenses (that Lady Tippins is a sought-after widow with many "lovers" in her "book" and that Jenny is the "mother" of her "bad child"). How, Kaplin wants to know, do these two succeed in gaining this complicity? And why? A "transparent lie" is a species of what psychologists Ellen Isaacs and Herb Clark define in "Ostensible Invitations" (1990) as an "ostensible speech act," one that carries out a pretense (246). Such speech acts have five defining features, including the pretense itself, a mutual recognition that it is a pretense, the collusion in carrying it out, and "ambivalence on the part of the first speaker" (247). The fifth feature is an "off-record purpose" or "real reason" for engaging in the pretense, which is usually (Isaacs and Clark found) to "satisfy a code of etiquette or politeness to which the speaker subscribes or believes the listener to subscribe" (247). Kaplin calls upon the findings of another study, Marsha Walton's "Ostensible Lies and the Negotiation of Shared Meanings" (1998), which describes the "ostensible lie": "a speech act that the speaker believes to be false but that is not intended to deceive the listener" (247). Because this speech act forces the listener to react as though the lie is the truth, even though both parties know it is not, the off-record purpose is a "show of power" (247). Lady Tippins and Jenny have no such power, however, and so Kaplin posits an off-record purpose for their transparent lies that includes three "appeals" instead. One appeal is that their pretenses allow everyone to avoid facing the unpleasant truth that their own society marginalizes impoverished widows and children. Another is that they relieve the Victorian anxiety about "readability of character" that is brought on by the "shares" culture (254): Lady Tippins and Jenny both give their listeners the illusion that the latter can see past pretenses to the truth. Finally, their pretenses reinforce the value and use of accepted social conventions: Lady Tippins performs the reassuring role of the "highly connected and sought-after widow" while Jenny performs that of the "stern responsible parent" of an uncontrollable child (258).

Because these characters are only the simulacra of these roles, Kaplin argues, their transparent lies "offer them unique sources of individual or social agency" (260). Jenny can read character more accurately than others because of her own doubleness (thus resolving the Eugene-Lizzie plot, for example), while Lady Tippins can get Veneering elected because the appeal that "she pretends to pretend to be an election agent" with "nothing to hide" engages her listeners' support (261). In the novel's closing chorus scene, Mortimer Lightwood uses this rhetorical device to voice most overtly the novel's social critique when he attempts to gain the collusion of his listeners in the pretense that Lizzie's past is "different from her real life" (265). When his listeners refuse to play along, the "encrusted prejudices" in the Voice of Society stand out in sharp relief, leading Twemlow to broaden the reach of what is considered socially valuable by redefining what a gentleman and a lady are.

Peter Gurney also looks at Our Mutual Friend in "'The Age of Veneer': Charles Dickens and the Antinomies of Victorian Consumer Culture." He analyzes Dickens's critique of 1860s materialism in the context of financial crisis and the emergence of finance capitalism. Gurney explores Dickens's critical attitude toward the reification of social relations in commodity culture alongside the contrasting attitude found in the author's own love of commodities himself, such as his dandified dress and particularity about home furnishings. Looking at the Veneerings' things (their camel crest, adulterated wine, and clothing), Gurney finds that while the Veneerings and their circle embody a severe critique of this materialism, the novel does not condemn commodities in themselves. It presents them, in the form of Little Johnny's toys and Eugene's domestic furnishings, for example, as weak solutions to the structural problems evoked by Dickens's "increasingly bleak vision" in the 1860s (230).

Joshua Gooch also discusses Our Mutual Friend in his monograph The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy. "Service work," as Gooch defines it in his introduction, is work that does not result immediately in a tangible product but is instead "immaterial, affective, and signifying" (2). It creates social relations (on the positive side) or social domination (on the negative) and thus became vital to a British economy that was shifting into a form of capitalism that included financial, administrative, transportational, and insurance sectors. Beginning with the autonomist version of neo-Marxism, which attends to the experiences of laborers, especially including those outside the place of work, Gooch calls upon a host of other theoretical concepts to support his analysis: Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977), which demonstrates the contingent and shifting conditions of discipline that respond to workers' resistances; Nancy Armstrong's study in Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) of the discourses that produce discipline in domestic space; and Judith Butler's examination of the social construction of identity. Gooch's study focuses on ways that fiction constructs the particular identities of gentlemanliness and respectability with which middle-class Victorian professionals distinguished themselves from the working-class laborers who earned similar real wages. As service workers internalize these gentlemanly and respectable ideals, they become self-disciplining subjects who cooperate with the capitalist "demand to work in order to survive," a mandate raised to religious tenet by Carlyle (5). Gooch considers narrative to be "work" as well—and so his study traces "the intertwining of aesthetic and economic" in order to "[uncover] the novel's engagement with the making and disciplining of subjects and characters as one embedded in the demand to work" (10).

His thesis about Our Mutual Friend is that the novel "redeem[s] immaterial work from the taint" of the eighteenth-century concept of unproductive labor, which equated such work with dependency, servility, and even slavery, "by examining the ways that it uses human skills to serve social or anti-social ends" (82). Gooch ranks Boffin's work in the pious fraud, which performs the affective work of redeeming Bella and Rokesmith, on the "social" side. The pretended dismissal scene with John Rokesmith, Gooch explains, enacts the threats of servility inherent in service work for men (that the "miser" Boffin purchases Rokesmith's "whole time") and of prostitution for women (that "mercenary" Bella would sell herself to a wealthy suitor) so that both possibilities may be rejected. Jenny Wren as designer of products and as resolver of plots also illustrates the positive affective and creative work that produces positive social relations. On the antisocial side, Riderhood blackmails Headstone, thus threatening his hard-won respectability: "[b]y turning to respectability, [Riderhood] turns one of the novel's crucial discourses of discipline into a means of extracting wages" so that "Headstone's final act of self-making is death, a murderous remaking of the self to the codes of respectability" (105, 106). Headstone thus "illustrates the political impasse of service work" in a novel that reflects "a halting attempt in the culture at large to move from the language of unproductive labor and fraud to an account of services as work within the domestic space yet also potentially separable from it" (108, 107).

Christopher Pittard contemplates the corollary between the "secular magic" arts of conjuring and novel-writing as a way to understand Dickens's commentary on the intellectual property and copyright debates of his time in "Conjuring Dickens: Magic, Intellectual Property, and The Old Curiosity Shop" (174). Arguing that Dickens's representations of magicians are a "comment on his own conditions of creativity," Pittard demonstrates that the conjuring characters in the novel—Sweet William, Dick Swiveller, Quilp, Humphrey—represent various conditions of the artist vis-à-vis the marketplace (174). Sweet William is the artist "physically deformed" by it, who "has resorted to more sensationalist routines" (175); Dick Swiveller evokes "the literary world in which texts are to be exchanged, quoted, and played with in a creative commons" (183); and Quilp satirizes the artist "who too zealously insists on the autonomy of his own creative processes" (183). Novel-writing, like conjuring, Pittard claims, stands between two sets of oppositions in the intellectual property and copyright debate. The first presents mechanical and literary modes of production in opposition, while writers, like conjurors, use both. The other opposes public and private aspects of creation: both the author's or conjuror's ownership of techniques and products is private although their display is public and so risks piracy. With these discussions, Pittard locates the novel in "the mid-nineteenth-century debate about intellectual property and copyright" and explains Dickens's own fascination with conjuring during the 1840s (174).

Jen Cadwallader examines the intersection of ethics and railway transport in "Death by Train: Spectral Technology and Dickens's Mugby Junction." She explicates the shifting representation of trains by Dickens and his contemporaries from "hybrid of natural imagery and mechanical detail" to the "spectralization" of her title: the locomotive and the railway system came to be portrayed as "more powerful than humans, outside of human control, and charged with malicious intent" (60, 61). Accidents were seen as inevitable, with no one to blame except the system. The main focus of the essay is an analysis of these effects as they appear in the set of stories published as Mugby Junction in the 1866 Christmas issue of All the Year Round and written collaboratively by Dickens, Andrew Halliday, Hesba Stretton, Charles Collins, and Amelia B. Edwards. Cadwallader's analysis reveals a reason for the "agreement still being honored … today" that Victorians made: "some will die so that others can move faster, or travel farther" (64). She demonstrates the perception created in these stories that not only passengers but also those working in the rail system lose "some sense of the code of conduct and morals that guided them as humans," since railway workers "must internalize the qualities of a machine" (64). Finally, she analyzes the ghosts in the stories as "a messy human element within the machine" that "derails" both mechanical workings and workers' morality, thus sealing the connection between machine and human (65). She concludes that these stories illustrate the deep anxiety the railroad caused Victorians in their willingness to "[cede] control to technology": not the deaths from accidents, but more globally the "loss of some sense of what it means to be human" (66).

In "Parrots, Birds of Prey, and Snorting Cattle: Dickens's Whig Agenda of the 1840s," David Paroissien examines Dickens's political ideology as evidenced in the work he produced as he was shifting from journalism to novel-writing. In this decade, Paroissien points out, England itself was entering an unprecedentedly reformist period regarding the role of government, particularly in response to the condition of the working classes. He characterizes the major conflict of this period as one between "interventionist policies of the Whigs" and "the determination of Tories and Conservatives to resist further legislative change" (63). Dickens was finding his "political bearings" as a novelist, journalist, and "public intellectual anxious to turn his 'social knowledge' to good practical account in some extraliterary way"—bearings that were decidedly Whig interventionist, as the early journalism Pariossien discusses shows (61, 64). He takes us through the mild satire of "'The Story Without a Beginning' (Translated from the German by Boz)" (1834), which tackles William IV's dismissal of Melbourne and the Whigs in November of that year; the more "biting" pamphlet Sunday under Three Heads (1836), which attacks Evangelical sabbatarianism as an "assault upon the poor" and on the people's liberty (65); and the parody in an 1843 "Report" to The Examiner of the 1842 inquiry into the conditions of child labor in mines and factories, which exposes a "backward" movement into "'ignorance and superstition'" at Oxford which would make the undergraduates "deaf and blind to the world around them" (66, quoting Dickens). Paroissien also discusses Dickens's extra-literary efforts to oppose such conservative ideas as Disraeli's Young England movement, evidence from letters regarding his efforts to understand legal work and to become a Police Magistrate, his entrance into the Whiggish circle around Lady Holland at Holland House, and the establishment of Urania Cottage. Although Dickens did turn down a request to stand for election as the Liberal Candidate for Reading in 1842, Paroissien concludes that "he never slackened in his commitment to reforming and improving public life, an agenda for change that shaped his entire career" (71).

In "Information in the Novel and the Novel as Information System: Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit and Margaret Drabble's Radiant Way Trilogy," Carol Colatrella argues that novels are "information systems" that "[depend] on the cognitive capacities of readers to make connections within novels" and between novels and real life (339, 368). In particular, she studies the way Little Dorrit and the novels of Drabble's Radiant Way trilogy (The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory) move from description of "individual cases of misfortune" to a broader social critique that shows readers the need for social change (368). Readers understand this ethical message, she demonstrates, largely by means of the "sympathy" developed for "some characters more than others" (369), an understanding that occurs as we engage in the cognitive propensities to "recogniz[e] literary codes" (340), to "mind-read" the characters (citing Lisa Zunshine's Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel [2006]), and to connect the latter to "real-world situations" (369).

Colatrella grounds this analysis on Donald Case's Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs, and Behavior (2012). Like factual texts, she observes, novels deploy information in five modalities: they "teach and entertain (utility), … they can be read as print and screen texts in addition to evoking material conditions (physicality), … they exhibit patterns and processes (structure/process), … they illustrate some sort of truth," and they raise "the question of intentionality" or "what a historical author meant and how the author function works in a novel" (343). She acknowledges the equivocality of claiming the "truth" function for works of fiction but nonetheless makes the Sidney-esque argument that fictional information can teach us about "attitudes and circumstances far from our own" and that gaining such information by means of a story is often "more powerful and engages more sympathy" (345). Little Dorrit, she contends, conveys the ethical message that "existing social values are selfish and cruel and that the criminal justice system … ought to be reformed" (349). The novels convey this message by inviting readers to sympathize with "those beaten down by social institutions" (346). Dickens's novel, she says, is an "important precursor" to Drabble's trilogy in critiquing "imperialism, bloated government bureaucracy, capitalist greed, and social hypocrisy," and both works show that "a surfeit of information is nevertheless insufficient in ameliorating social problems" (341).

Brandon Chitwood's "Eternal Returns: A Christmas Carol's Ghosts of Repetition" argues that Carol's power derives at least as much from "the phantasmatic forces that compel Scrooge to transmute solitude into solidarity and despair into joy" as it does from the "psychological credibility" of Scrooge himself, as standard critical responses of the past have claimed (675). He reads the novella as a "culture text" and an "ongoing cultural process … in which social pleasure is generated and reified via a curiously repetitive narrative of metaphysical despair" (675). Scrooge must "learn to live" from the ghosts (676), whose "liminality" and "repetitiousness" lead Chitwood to read them as Lacanian "floating signifiers" (677). "The Symbolic always points to the Real," as he paraphrases Lacan (in "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter' [2006]), and so the ghosts point Scrooge (and reader) to "the necessity" of death and of Christmas, thus making sure we "follow the command" to "Have a Merry Christmas" (678). In his analysis, Having a Merry Christmas turns out to mean moving money, as Scrooge does post-conversion (683). Chitwood also demonstrates that this money-moving Christmas-morning ecstasy is a "symptom," not a "result," of the terror caused by the sights shown him by the third ghost, a condition that "inextricably link[s]" Dickens's vision of Christmas with "a vast cosmic despair" (682, 680). This terror and despair, he says, are "the message" as much as the domestic cheer to which later adaptations tend to reduce the story. As with the repetitious ghosts and Scrooge, so with the continuously expanding field of Carol repetitions and adaptations and ourselves: as a culture text and cultural process, Chitwood concludes, the story "reif[ies] capitalism" and "recode[s] Christmas as capitalism," rendering both a necessity, since "Scrooge is a ghost we can expect to be haunted by for as long as his world is ours" (684).

Individual Morality

If the above studies keep their main attention focused on Dickens's treatments of unethical systems, even as he traces the fates of individuals and their development while entangled in such systems, the following studies attend mainly to Dickens's presentation of individuals and their developing sense of moral rectitude as this process affects or could affect the larger social systems in which they live their lives. Jerome Meckier argues in "Repetitions and Reversals: Patterns for Social Change in Pickwick Papers," for example, that it is "reversal, the so-called change of heart, which he preferred to revolution as the basic recipe for improving human nature" (3; Meckier's emphasis). Pickwick's decisions to meet wrongdoing with "Christ-like acts of mercy and benevolence" instead of punishment correct the "repetitions of socially despicable behavior" that recur throughout the novel, a pattern that constitutes not only the theme but also the structure of the novel since these corrections supply the climactic moments of the plot: Pickwick's relief of Jingle and Job Trotter and his freeing of Mrs. Bardell from the Fleet (4). This pattern, Meckier argues, reverses the usual picaresque plot in which the picaro is repeatedly duped and finally retaliates (8–9). He traces this pattern in Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities as well, claiming that events like Krook's combustion or the French Revolution demonstrate the violence of revolution. Meckier concludes that understanding this Dickensian analysis properly will help us to refute George Orwell's criticism that Dickens called only for a change of spirit and not one of structure. We should credit Dickens, he says, "for consistently maintaining that it is pointless to alter the system before human nature has been improved significantly" (9).

Joshua Taft argues in "Disenchanted Religion and Secular Enchantment in A Christmas Carol" that Carol presents "a perceptive guide to religion and secularism's diverse possibilities" if we attend to its Christian ethos and its supernatural elements (672). He argues on the one hand that Carol's overt Christian elements participate in a "disenchanted" form of religion, one that emphasizes humane ethics rather than religious doctrine, since Scrooge's "fault was not neglecting religious faith but disregarding his obligations to other human beings" (662). On the other hand, the novella uses an enchanted version of secularism in its use of ghost story and masque genres, whose conventions assume "a universe full of secular wonders" that have the power to effect moral transformation (664). The Christmas spirits transform Scrooge by using the visual power of spectacle (as in a masque), which causes him—and the reader—to become "enamored with existence" (666). This change is signified and encouraged by the "major stylistic feature" of the novella, "joyous, enthusiastic accumulation of detail" (667). Such catalogues, Taft contends, teach the "ethical lesson" that we should seek "the wonder and mystery found in the purely secular world" they present (668).

In "Ethical Metafiction in Dickens's Christmas Hauntings," Brian Sabey identifies two contrasting presentations, one Kantian and one Levinasian, of the ethical efficacy of the fictional imagination in two different tales. In Carol, the hauntings teach Scrooge the ability to "imagine the situation of others more vividly than he could do on his own," a "Kantian … concept of perception" that paves the way for the ethical encounter in reality—Scrooge with others in his world, readers with others in our own (132). He finds the Levinasian message in a "forgotten sibling-text to A Christmas Carol," the 1858 A House to Let (124). In this story, Sophonisba is haunted by someone looking through a window across the street and is led to an ethical encounter with this person, but the intervening fictional or imaginative stories brought in by another character do not solve the mystery. Here, fiction is shown to provide "an alternative to or an escape from ethical responsibility," and so conforms more closely to the Levinasian notion that without the ethical encounter in the real world there is only "comprehension" or "integration into the identity of the same" and no "ethical responsiveness and responsibility" between a self and an other who are not the same (136, 135). Sabey concludes that Dickens affirms both possible ethical efficacies for fiction: it can be used "to avoid the duty of responding appropriately to real others," and it can be used "to educate the imagination and foster generosity towards others" (123).

In "Money, Power, and Appearance in Dombey and Son," Michael Hollington approaches Dombey through Georg Simmel's Philosophie des Geldes [The Philosophy of Money] (1900), a work that describes "money's 'effects upon the inner world—upon the vitality of individuals, upon the linking of their fates, upon culture in general'" and also through Walter Benjamin's "materialist physiognomics," the "close symptomatic reading of the surface minutiae of gesture and behavior" (87, quoting Simmel's preface). Hollington's thesis is that Dombey's way of life corresponds to Simmel's descriptions of the "money style of life," including "the confusion of substance and appearance; the neglect or denial of spiritual and moral values, of human emotional bonds, of personality and individuality; and the promotion in their place of abstract intellectualization and calculation and the reification of the self [and] of other human beings" (86–87). His reading helps him lay to rest the criticism that frequently appears regarding Dombey, that he is "unconvincing" as a capitalist because he lacks "entrepreneurial, swashbuckling vividness" (89). Simmel's description of those who "neglect or deny human bonds" illuminates Dombey's purchase of Edith and his treatment of his children (89). These readings also bring into clear relief what Hollington considers two "powerful, large structural ironies of the novel," that the very methods Dombey uses to guard "the most precious 'treasure' of all, his son and heir, is the precise means of destroying" it and that at the end "it is now Dombey, not Son, who asks, 'What is money?'" (92, 95).

In the chapter on Dickens in Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, Narrative, and Community, Richard Hughes Gibson identifies two "competing impulses" in the delineations of forgiveness found in The Life of Our Lord, an extended letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts regarding the disciplinary system at Urania Cottage, the Christmas book The Battle of Life, and Dombey and Son (48). The first impulse is the "unconditional forgiveness and ethical generosity" that Gibson shows animating Dickens's accounts of the parables in The Life of Our Lord, "in which the principles of good business have been reversed" with "no balancing of moral books" (48, 47). This impulse predominates in The Battle of Life, whose plot resolves with the ability of the flawed characters to learn to "For-get and For-give" and "Do as you–wold–be–done–by" (quoting Dickens), the mottoes of the Christ-like servant aptly named Clemency Newcome. It is the impulse Dickens would like us to imitate when we are the forgiving party. The second impulse appears in the "duty passages" in Life of Our Lord, whose plots demonstrate that "those who fail to do their duty ultimately pay" and that "God's forgiveness is earned by good deeds rather than coming as an entirely unmerited, free gift" (48, 49; Gibson's emphasis). It predominates in the descriptions of the marks on literal balance sheets (red for bad, black for good) that the matron of Urania Cottage should keep for each woman. Dickens would like those needing forgiveness to follow this impulse. Gibson's analysis of the way these two impulses interanimate one another in Dombey and Son gives us a fresh look at the contradictions in the novel over who gets forgiven and to what extent. Dombey, Gibson argues, "'converts' to the mad logic of the parables" with Florence's good influence, while Edith's banishment to Australia and Alice's death "expose the limits of what forgiveness can do in the world," so that the novel has it both ways: it can "exalt forgiveness's extravagance" but also "[demonstrate] that our actions have irreversible consequences" (72, 75).

In "Dickens, Society, and Art: Change in Dickens's View of Effecting Social Reform," Robert Heaman argues that when Dickens shifted from writing "condition of England" novels to writing Great Expectations, his ideas about how to make social improvements also shifted, a change that appears in the new perception that Pip gains, one that includes the "distinctive qualities of an artist": not only the "imaginative capacity to perceive reality truly, to love, to forgive, and to accept the 'eternal shape' of the past" but also the ability to "perceive design and order amidst apparent disjunction and chaos" (34, quoting Great Expectations; 38). He learns to see and interpret such patterns as the likeness between Molly's and Estella's hands or the premonitions of Miss Havisham's death, the effect of which is to encourage him "through feeling, instinct, memory, association, and imagination" to develop the capacity to forgive those who have wronged him and so get "beyond himself and his personal grievances" (40, 41). Heaman closes his reading with reference to Matthew Arnold's Hebraism-Hellenism dichotomy and Eugene Wrayburn's pursuit of Lizzie Hexam: as with Pip, Heaman argues, Eugene's Hellenistic aesthetic sensibility "can become his means of redemption," and because Dickens has come to see that his society needs such Hellenism, he does not allow Headstone to destroy Eugene (44). Thus, Heaman concludes, "Dickens is pursuing a more ambitious transformation of society than the nation's leaders are capable of producing" (45).

Pip also gains a wider perception of pattern in Jonathan Grossman's "Living the Global Transport Network in Great Expectations." However, Grossman's reading argues that in order to live more ethically in the globalizing world of the 1860s, Pip needs to acquire an awareness of what it means to "[live] the transport network" (236). Grossman uses this phrase to signify the "analytical space between the historical formation of subjects' thinking … and the system shaping thinking" (247). The system shaping Pip's thinking, in this reading, is the global transport system in which he and Magwitch have always been embedded, although the young Pip is blind to it. Why, Grossman asks, does narrator Pip choose to initiate and shape his story around a moment which is in fact a chance encounter between himself as a boy and an escaped convict? One answer is that his story was always shaped by that encounter, although he did not know it at the time, and therein lies the lesson:

Magwitch's dramatic return thus helps to prepare Pip's reimagining of his life, not as centered on himself in the first person, but through a limited third-person standpoint, born in part from his inability to know of ongoing networked happenings elsewhere and from the global transport system's formal relations of collocation and interchangeability.

(240)

Grossman uses the terms "collocation and interchangeability" and "simultaneity and synchronicity" to evoke the bewildering new vision of the global world brought about by nineteenth-century transportation networks of "physically criss-crossing people" who are doing things and living lives that can have direct consequences for each other, but of which they are all ignorant (227). Pip grows up not knowing that Magwitch was simultaneously making a fortune for him in Australia. Magwitch's return teaches him—and us—that "his not-knowing has been constitutive of the course of his life" (227). The novel thus demonstrates the necessity for "collapsing people's separate synchronous paths through time and space" in order to achieve "an omniscient-like perspective of oneself," "a kind of sociability," Grossman concludes, that Pip and his readers need to develop in order to adapt to their newly networked world, but an awareness that seems only capable of developing in retrospect (228, 226).

Jerome Meckier published two articles arguing that a laudable spirit appears in Pip if one considers Great Expectations to be the memoir or autobiography of a Mr. Philip Pip, who delayed publishing in Charles Dickens's All the Year Round until all its main personages passed away so that the revelation of so much painful or incriminating information would not damage their well-being. In "Estella, Dead or Alive? Consideration and Incrimination in Great Expectations," Meckier outlines the ways each character would be ill-served if the memoir's events were made broadly public: Estella would learn of her parentage, Joe and Biddy that they "got married on the day [Pip] intended to propose to Biddy," and the legal world that Startop, Herbert, and Pip himself were accomplices in the concealment and attempted escape of a returned convict (227). Mr. Philip Pip's ethical spirit, Meckier argues, also shows in his reason for publishing the memoir: it is "a tract for the times, a warning against snobbery and over-expectancy" (227). In "Death(s) and Great Expectations," Meckier works the above arguments into a reading of Pip as "the only character" in the novel who comes to share and express "Dickens's tragicomic perspective" that death is inevitable but "temporal happiness" is not (50). The seemingly morbid rate of deaths occurring in the course of the story, implied by the arguments about Pip's "publication" dates recounted above and deaths taking place before the story begins, is tempered by humor or irony (and Meckier includes an exhaustive description of the ironies that color the plot twists and characterizations). He supports the "comic" dimension of his "tragicomic" thesis most fully in the moral growth he sees in Pip. Across the three death-bed scenes that he witnesses, he develops from "victim … of all three death-bed characters" (Mrs. Joe, Miss Havisham, and Magwitch) to "intercessor, a role that goes beyond mercy and forgiveness" (46–47). Finally, with the scene in which he places little Pip on the old tombstone, the novel "replaces the convict's menacing act with a mentor's solicitude, implying that kindness and compassion can triumph even over death symbolized by the stone" (50).

Aesthetics

I am pleased to include in this survey a section called "aesthetics"—that is, to have found that there were enough studies attending to Dickens's work as literary art to warrant such a section. As Michael O'Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton write in the introduction to their collection The Persistence of Beauty: Victorians to Moderns, "in the wake of Romanticism, beauty is … 'in trouble,'" and they urge us to understand that "exploring such trouble has perplexing but richly rewarding aesthetic results" (5). "Aesthetics" (like "Ethics") is a broad topic, so I have divided it into subsections according to the aesthetic foci taken by the studies: "Ways of Seeing," "Mode," "Form," "Voice," "Style," and "Characterization"—considerations solely of literary matters in some cases and in others of literary matters blended with the aesthetic techniques of other art forms.

Ways of Seeing

John Harvey's monograph The Poetics of Sight is one of the latter. Harvey traces the history of a particularly intensely visual period in the history of the novel, 1830–1930, when he states that novelists shared the high valuation of sight and the pictorial with visual artists. Harvey's interest is "the poetics particular to visual art, especially in the use of visual metaphor" and "the signifying role of vivid sights in poetry and fiction" (9). His chapter "Bleak House to Lighthouse: The Optics of the Novel" includes (as the title suggests) an extended study of the visual dimension of Bleak House with excursions into works by other novelists, from George Eliot through the later realists and naturalists to Proust and Lawrence, and finally Houellebecq. His history begins with the correspondence between the visual aesthetic theories of William Gilpin and Joshua Reynolds in the late eighteenth century, both of whom "cautioned against the 'nice representation of … minute parts'" (Gilpin) or the "exact expression of … 'minute particularities'" (Reynolds), and the narrative practice of Jane Austen, who tended to present few visual details in her descriptions of people and places (161). The "signal change," he says, appeared with Walter Scott, who extends the taste for "picturesque" landscape depiction that developed during the Regency to characters, especially in the historical novels, an innovation that corresponds to the taste for history paintings at that time (162). Dickens, Harvey contends, "is a seeing author," whether he writes "in the style of popular caricature," as with Pickwick Papers, or with the "visual-satirical brilliance" shown in the description of the Veneerings' first dinner party as reflected in their mirror (165, Harvey's emphasis; 164). His scenes are "not just pictorial, but positively cinematic" and his "logic is the logic of sight" (165). His narrators, particularly the first-person retrospectors, are first and foremost "seeing subjects" who create the past as past but in "a fullness of detail" that "transcends" its pastness (166, 168).

Bleak House, Harvey argues, has "[o]f all English novels … the most vivid, varied, and coherent visual life" (172). He supports this contention with a characterization of Esther as "perhaps the supreme 'seeing subject' of the English nineteenth-century novel" (171). Harvey also notes a motif of "concentrated watching, and spying" among the characters that includes the idea "that Justice and her agents may, in truth, be not only blind, but the enemy of sight, and work to blind" (179, 180). Reading the "whole phenomenon at the centre of the novel—the Law, its lawyers, and the fatal Court of Chancery"—as principally realized "through appearances," he demonstrates in the end that the "poetic axis of the novel runs between two women, who are both blind and sighted: sighted Justice wearing her blindfold, and the 'seeing subject' Esther who, temporarily, is made literally blind" (177, 180).

In "Detective or Defective Vision, A Matter of Breathing or Dying in Bleak House," Emily V. Epstein Kobayashi proposes that Dickens teaches readers "detective vision," a "perceptive give and take with the environment," as the solution to the motif in Bleak House of "defective vision," which is emblematized by the "red tape" of Chancery that closes off the possibility of "healthy interaction with one's surroundings" (190, 185). Taking Krook as the center of a "network of characters that radiate … in a web of metonymic association or metaphoric opposition" (185), she reads those characters that are metonymically associated with Krook—Chadband, Phil, Jo, the Dedlocks, and Tulkinghorn—as embodiments of defective vision: repressed, unable to read their circumstances properly, and resistant to being read themselves. Esther and Inspector Bucket, on the other hand, are both metaphorically opposed to Krook and possessed of detective vision, which they "translate into useful social action" (190). Kobayashi argues that Dickens uses Krook's death to lead his readers into detective vision since it prompts us to examine "an environment that would produce such a death" (194). She concludes, however, that Dickens "tests the limits" of detective vision to ameliorate the structural social ills the novel presents (202).

Jonathan Farina analyzes those scenes in which "characters finish each other's sentences with comically incorrect words that garble their interlocutor's intentions," a form of dialogue (perhaps I should say "mutual monologue") that he calls "Mad-Libbing" (325). Such moments, he contends, express "alternative stories" whose presence evokes for Farina "the dominant Victorian paradigm of psychology," "associationism," which was elaborated by Thomas Brown in the 1820s (332, 331). Associationism, Farina explains, conceived the workings of the mind as "a series of contingent sensations or impressions," which Brown called "suggestions" (331). It is closely aligned with the "metonymic methodolgy" that subtends Victorian criticism, which favored a metonymic practice that "appreciates phrases out of context" and respected "metonymic tangents as a legitimate mode of intellectual work" (325, 333). It also underlies Victorian modes of realism, which "[suggest] and [foreclose] alternative stories, meanings, feelings, and possibilities" and "present themselves as corrective representations of readers' false initial assumptions" (332). Farina suggests that we might understand Victorian ways of seeing better if we recall these alternatives with respect instead of dismissing them as "stupid" (333).

Mode

In Dickens's Novels as Poetry: Allegory and Literature of the City, Jeremy Tambling reads Dickens's works as poetry. He says his book is not a formalist study, by which he means "tying the analysis back to the writer's intention" (8), and indeed the insights yielded by his readings tend to the psychoanalytic, as he calls often upon Freudian and Lacanian conceptions of unconscious or "primary" processes, such as condensation and displacement, that drive the production of dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue, riddles and rebuses, and, Tambling would have us understand, the poetry of Dickens's writing.

The book includes four parts, each of which takes a different avenue into "this poetry" (Tambling's favorite expression for Dickens's works). Part 1 begins with a look at Dickens's literary language, beginning with an erudite examination of what he read (the erudition belonging both to Dickens and to Tambling), including, seemingly, all the eighteenth-century and Regency novelists, poets, and dramatists. This part examines the influences of Hogarthian caricature on Dickens's comic sensibility, which Tambling presents as darkly baroque and uncanny—more closely allied to "Quilp and his avatars" than to Pickwick and his escapades—and also on Dickens's response to the Romantic poets. Tambling's reading of Bleak House shows, for example, the way Dickens "brings Wordsworth into urban experience" (68, 36).

In Part 2, Tambling dives into the language of Dickens's characters, claiming that "people are forms of poetry and speak poetry" (75). In one chapter, he attends to Jingle's speech and Sam's Wellerisms as "urban poetry" (another favorite description of Dickens's writing), with Jingle's parataxes, like shorthand, created for a mechanical age, and Weller's jokes, which must be apprehended "as image clusters" whose "instantaneity belongs to those people Dickens is most interested in, living by their wits because they have nothing else to live on" (90, 91). The other chapters look at Dickens's use of the braggadocio figure in, for example, Mrs. Gamp, whose neologisms—words like "Bragian," "bage," and "debage"—suggest multiple pronunciations and meanings and so perform a Lacanian "ordering in language" in which "'[t]he world of words creates the world of things'" (100; Tambling does not cite which of the five Lacanian texts listed in his bibliography this quotation comes from). The final chapter reads the phrase "Dombey and Son" alongside the essay "Where We Stopped Growing" to demonstrate that "age and childhood depend on each other's prior existence for their existence" (107).

Part 3 elaborates close readings of the opening chapters of the late novels as "overture[s]" that "[weave] musical themes to be heard later in more singleness" (147). As Tambling unpacks these "overtures," names, images, and even single letters "interchange and resonate" in networks that spread through not just single novels but Dickens's entire oeuvre, calling and responding to each other, as do the rhymes, assonances, and alliterations of a lyric poem (161). The best way to convey the manner in which the Tambling's readings ramify is to provide a lengthy quotation commenting on the opening of Great Expectations:

The third paragraph recalls Bleak House with "this bleak place" with mud, marsh, and with the river's presence, the Thames, which later, near this spot, contains the drowned body of Compeyson "tumbling on the tides" (GE 3.16), found "many miles from the scene of his death." John Harmon quotes "the scene of his death" as "the scene of my death" (OMF 2.13), meaning the Thames at Limehouse. Magwitch and Compeyson fight in the mud as they later fight underwater flowing almost parallel to this spot. Both are scenes of death, like the space here from the churchyard to the sea, which is death, as in the opening of Dombey and Son. This Christmas Eve is when Pip gets his "first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things" on "a memorable raw afternoon towards evening": "raw" as in Bleak House. "Raw" suggests lack of protection from the weather and redness, like the "little redness" in Mrs. Joe (1.7), and beyond its suggestion of coldness it anticipates Bradley Headstone in the churchyard in his anger, bringing "his clenched hand down upon the stone with a force that laid the knuckles raw and bare" (OMF 2.15). Perhaps rawness gives the significance of the dead boy called Bartholomew, the name of a flayed martyr.

(161)

Part 4 focuses on the primary processes driving several examples of dreaming, or half-waking, or (in the case of Edwin Drood) opium hallucination—plural states of consciousness that Tambling traces in Oliver's "waking dream" of Monks and Fagin at his window, David Copperfield's state during the tempest that kills Steerforth and Ham, and Jasper's "scattered consciousness" (192, 206). All these moments, he demonstrates, present confrontations with "the Mask," a figure he takes from Dickens's essay "A Christmas Tree," in which Dickens recounts his terror of a paper mask that Tambling reads as a "figure of the figure … staring fixedly, showing that figuration covers and expresses death" and "awakens the child … with the potentiality of trauma" (181). The Mask is the uncanny "it," the "death inside" which "make[s] strange all recognitions because the familiar face … contains its non-identity" (181). In this dream economy, failing to wake presents one crisis while waking itself splits or confines the ego. The Mask is also "always comic … in its quality of ironizing and mocking" so that its "ambiguity conditions the multiple drives in Dickens's texts, towards trauma, and the fixedness of death, and awareness of the comic" (181).

If Tambling focuses the latter half of his book on discovering the deathly and the uncanny propelling Dickens's comedy in the late novels, Malcolm Andrews's "The Passing of the Pickwick Moment" supplies a detailed study of the ways Dickens reformed what was comic in his first novel in response to the developing sensibilities of Victorians in the 1830s. Andrews addresses four "innovative elements"—realism, characterization, sex and violence, and wit and humor—to explain why Dickens was able to create "a community of readers who would laugh with him and who would come to relish his particular idiosyncratic humour" (99, 102). The realism of Pickwick grounded the work in "the comedy inherent in everyday life" and educated readers "in comic sensibility" (102). His characters, which start as "comically inelastic" caricatures, "begin to thaw as the novel's story warms up" (103). In response to the reforming climate of the 1830s, he raises the tone, becomes less coarse in his physical comedy, and cultivates "humor" rather than "wit" (the latter tending in earlier comic modes to "[humiliate] the infirmities of others" [105]). Pickwick Papers had begun in that older tradition, which had inspired the Chapman, Hall, and Seymour project in its inception, but as "Boz's manner of treating [Pickwick] becomes more 'gentle and genial'" the novel encourages "affectionate laughter" rather than "incit[ing] ridicule" (108, quoting Carlyle). By 1849, Andrews concludes, even Pickwickian comedy had passed by, and "[c]heerfulness with earnestness was the new taste" (109, Andrews's emphasis).

Form

In their Introduction to The Persistence of Beauty, editors Michael O'Neill, Mark Sandy, and Sarah Wootton claim that the collection aims to trouble dichotomies such as the beautiful and the sublime, beauty and irony, and "formal perfection and recalcitrant realities" (2). They hope to demonstrate that categories of aesthetic practice and experience that are too often held to be "competing and distinct" can be seen in a relation that is "finer than that of contrast," with distinctions more "questions of degree than absolute" (2). In his chapter of this collection called "Dickens and the Line of Beauty," Robert Douglas-Fairhurst analyzes the dichotomy between "beauty," often static in Dickens, he claims, citing the beautiful and proud female characters who "turn into statues" in prose that "stiffens into melodramatic tableaux," and the temporal and spatial movements—even vagaries—of his plots (33).

Douglas-Fairhurst begins with a discussion of beauty as a quality Dickens finds in both familiar things and in odd similes. Such beauties (and he supplies several marvelously outlandish Dickensian similes) lead him to a consideration of Wellerisms, particularly as these were collected in anthologies like The Beauties of Pickwick (1838) and then to the interpolated stories that "echo" Wellerisms "at a larger structural level" (41). Douglas-Fairhurst derives from this discussion a description of Dickensian narrative structure as "[d]igression as a form of narrative progression"—"a serpentine form … of writing"—that is analogous to the S shape that Hogarth called "the line of beauty" (42, 41). This chapter brings these various considerations of beauty to bear on Bleak House: the pride and beauty of Lady Dedlock, the doll-like beauty of Ada, the "romantic side of familiar things," and the serpentine plots (43). Examining the final dash in Esther's closing words at the novel's end, "they can very well do without much beauty in me—even supposing—," Douglas-Fairhurst observes that it "shuts down, or rather opens out into the realm of endless supposition we call the imagination. Or perhaps that dash is the summation of a narrative that has been embodying and enacting a model of beauty all along. It is the final link in a chain—the final pen-stroke in a line of beauty" (43).

In Our Mutual Friend and Network Form," Anna Gibson argues for an analogy between Victorian scientific theories of evolution and of physiological processes, both imagined as networks, and Dickens's serial form. She characterizes the network as "a self-generating and open system of interactions" and contends that Dickens's novels use this mechanism to portray their societies and the characters who inhabit them (63). Like the Darwinian "entangled bank," Dickens's "Society" is animated by "multiple heterogeneous organisms" that "act on, react to, and change one another as they compete for limited resources": "money, real estate, and useless pieces of furniture" (75). Dickens's characters, she claims, are propelled not by "individual will, family affection, and sympathy" but by the physiological affects of attraction and repulsion which "[override]" those other "modes of character motivation" that Dickens "inherited from Richardson and Austen" (74). Dickens uses the serial publication form as a way to keep his novel-networks "open and self-generating," a point Gibson makes with a discussion of number plans that show him experimenting with different combinations of characters in reaction to each other.

How, in such a seemingly relentlessly mechanistic system, can those higher sentiments prevail and the novels achieve a suitably moral closure? Gibson answers her question with Darwinian sexual selection. Into the selection system, she demonstrates, Darwin inserts the possibility of individual choice and so "mediates between hardwired biology and conscious deliberation," the latter producing a "conclusion" that overcomes the "mechanisms of the system" (79). As with Darwinian evolution, so with Dickensian society: "the attractions that bring about these domestic relationships have the capacity to produce unexpected social consequences—caregiving and love—out of an otherwise acquisitive social system" (80). This creation of characters motivated by physiological affects, Gibson says, explains the paradox that so puzzles E. M. Forster, who finds Dickens's characters both "flat" and yet "vital," and helps us to understand more accurately G. H. Lewes's observation that Dickens's writing belongs to the "phenomena of hallucination." Gibson would have us understand that Lewes is not "pathologizing Dickens and his readers," but instead that he "posits sensory response and intellectual thought as two contradictory but equally potent types of novel reading and writing" (80).

Christopher M. Keirstead explores the "sense of contemporaneity" in Dickens's literary travel essays as a way to shed light on the development of this form in "Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay: or, 'A Flight' (and 'Night Walks') on Flight" (340). One contemporary-seeming phenomenon that he finds in Dickens's "A Flight" and "Night Walks" is the condition that Jon Anderson calls "travel disorientation" in "Exploring the Consequences of Mobility: Reclaiming Jet Lag as the State of Travel Disorientation" (2013). This condition is caused by a combination of "geographical, emotional, psychological, as well as physical" disruptions that are "highly stimulating and unsettling" (341). Causes of travel disorientation include the newly rapid pace of travel, the passivity required of travelers locked into their travel compartments, and the transient communities encountered there. Kierstead identifies Dickens's means of coping with this condition as his "active and expansive imagination," which "begins internally but is always ready to expand outward socially," a process that aligns with the aims he outlines for his journals, which he hoped would "conduct readers effectively from individual household spaces to more global and collective ones" (344, 348).

In both "A Flight" and "Night Walks," Dickens describes his encounters with members of the underclasses, a kind of experience whose loss due to new highspeed and expensive modes of travel he regrets. Keirstead identifies another element of literary travel writing as a form in both these descriptions and the regret that is expressed: "the particular difficulty the travel writer faces … in trying to craft an ethical response upon being hailed in this way by inequality" (352). This issue, Keirstead concludes, lies at the heart of the literary travel essay form and travel disorientation as a modern condition: a "tension between the forces of capital as what initiate and govern movement and human engagement … and a more ethical will to know all classes and branches of what Dickens was fond of calling 'the great human family'" (353).

In "Dickens's Performances of Astonishment and Nicholas Nickleby," Mark Hennelly, Jr. would like us to consider Dickens's "performances of astonishment" as perhaps "'the right critical focus for discussing … Dickens's astonishingly rich and great comic novel'" (43, quoting Michael Slater's introduction to the 1978 Penguin Edition). His article takes us through an astonishing array of "afterlives" of astonishment, starting with its traditional motifs found in pantomime and melodrama (standing stock still, open-mouthed, silent, with raised hands, etc.), which can be pretended or acted with deceptive or ironic intent, or meant sincerely. Hennelly goes on to consider other kinds of astonishment—borderline states of consciousness (like mesmerism) as theorized in Victorian physiological psychology, liminal or transformative states as described in anthropological studies, and the Freudian return of the repressed. "[P]erformed astonishment," then, can signify or function as a conversion experience, which "sometimes follows a kind of descent of the holy spirit, or … an uncanny ascent of repressed memory" (30). Reading Nickleby as a "'tableau of the whole'" (42, quoting Rochester in Jane Eyre), he pulls together the implications of all these (and other) transformative afterlives of astonishment to demonstrate that the novel's scenes of astonishment are "critically central" to its "plots and meanings" (26).

Voice

In The Value of the Novel, Peter Boxall calls, in this post-theory moment, for a new articulation of literary value and of literary critical values for "our own generation," an articulation that while reviving the notion of "value" itself would retain the important insights gained in the theory revolution (2). His book addresses this task by examining the novel specifically, which he demonstrates to be an essential form whose capacities at once to "shape the world and resist its demands" can help us in our struggles "with and against what we have and what we know" and so to "[gear] ourselves to a future state which is not yet here" (12, 143). Some of these struggles, he points out, are the most pressing we have, including the information revolution and the threat of eco-catastrophe that he reminds us "will surely transform our relation both to the technosphere and the biosphere" (143).

Dickens's David Copperfield and the late novels of Samuel Beckett serve as the main texts under discussion in Boxall's chapter on "voice," a concept he would like to invoke without including the humanist myth of transcendent presence. He argues that while Dickens's novel creates a vivid effect of presence and Beckett's books as vivid an effect of effacement, neither author posits a full self-presence behind these effects. Instead, a "speaking I seeks to become its own parent, to give partial and fitful birth to itself as a character" (34–35), a proceeding that reflects back to us "the process by which we make ourselves out of the stories we tell ourselves" (38). One of the "gifts" the novel can give us, therefore, is this capacity for revealing to us the partialness, contingency, and self-difference that cleave our own senses of self. Boxall's reading of Copperfield, for example, argues that as David "makes his journey towards himself, he maintains [the] absence that inhabits" the name of his absent father (David Copperfield), which "achieves its paternal power not by speaking, but … by marking the failure of the narrative voice to summon it to presence" (31, 32). This power of absence is "the site of a kind of latent aesthetic potential—the very possibility of narrative—rather than an insufficiency that must be overcome" (32).

Style

In "The Chimes and the Rhythm of Life," Matthias Bauer argues that in The Chimes Dickens presents in the style of the narration "the right kind of living in time," one that responds to a "world in constant metamorphosis" (119, 112). He makes this argument with an analysis of rhythm "as one of the foremost instruments at the disposal of a writer seeking to influence change" (112). Rhythm, he states, can be a "link between verbal art and the representation of life and society" (112). In The Chimes, the repetition and variation in the rhythm and melody of the voices Toby Veck hears in the chimes ringing the changes model the "desirable" life (122). This rhythm is expressed verbally in the anaphora, alliterations, and ancruses of what the voices say (e.g., "Toby Veck, keep a good heart, Toby"), and Bauer includes several readings of such rhythmic variations in the prose of the narrative. The intervention of the three social reforming gentlemen establishes a repetitive, regular, and monotonous rhythm that "literally interrupt[s] the life processes of Tony and his circle," an interruption whose "fatal outcome" Toby is made to see in his dream: "the denial of time will bring about self-annihilation" (116, 119).

Characterization

In "Travelling Narrator, Travelling Characters: Developments in Narration and Characterization in the Novels of Dickens," Alison Rutledge argues that Dickens's travel writing of the 1840s should be considered essential to an understanding of the ways Dickens "changed and matured as a prose stylist," and that by extension the travel writing form should be understood as important to the development of novel form in the nineteenth century (51). Rutledge finds a strong contrast between Dickens's methods of narration and characterization in Martin Chuzzlewit (written before his travel narratives) and Little Dorrit (written afterwards). In Chuzzlewit, the narrator is the through-line in a cascade of minor characters that are presented with ironic distance and that function as a system for presenting an idea: the satire of "selfishness in all its forms" (55). These techniques disperse the reader's attention among and distance it from the characters (54). In Little Dorrit, however, the central characters focalize the narration and receive full development in conventional plots. Before the travel narratives, in short, the narrator is "authoritarian" and the protagonist "weak" (52); afterwards, the narrator is "weak" in a "dual protagonist structure" (52). Rutledge locates the development of this reversal in Pictures from Italy and American Notes, in which Dickens decentralizes the narrator by including dialogue and long quotations from other works, using his narrating voice as both "the observer and the observed" (58), and "us[ing] the limitations of his narrator's perspective in order to create tension between the story and the discourse" (63)—techniques that she notes are developed more fully in the "unreliable narration" in the work of later novelists (56).

In "Modern Characters in the Late Novels of Charles Dickens," Herbert Foltinek contends that, with Arthur Clennam and Eugene Wrayburn, Dickens began to produce figures that, although unmistakably "Dickensian," seem surprisingly modern (146). Clennam's depressed passivity, traumatized inertia, and "Nobody" status are traits that Foltinek considers modern, as are the passages of "psycho-narration" or interior monologue with which these traits are presented (150). Eugene Wrayburn's modern traits include his alienation and fragmentedness. Both figures enter domestic happiness (Clennam also "usefulness"), and as they "retreat into traditional roles, they cease to be modern characters" (154). Dickens's endings thus "take both characters—and both novels—back to Victorian modes of writing and thinking" (154).

Jessica Hughes takes Dickens to task in "Dickens's The Life of Our Lord and the Problem of Jesus" for creating an even "flatter" Jesus than the one in the Bible. She claims that one reason for the flatness is the nineteenth-century shift in "cultural attitudes and theological emphasis" from the atonement to the incarnation, a shift that moves the "narrative focus" away from the individual Christian (who dies and is resurrected with Jesus) to "the historical individual who is also the eternal God" (268, 269). The result is such an idealization of the figure that it cannot develop or change. (Hughes uses Bakhtin's contrast between epic and novelistic heroes to make this point.) She also discusses the tension in the genres of The Life: the demands of biography and novel, which would require attention to human uniqueness (Jesus' humble origins, for example) and setting ("the very mundane, dirty, working world of first-century Galilee") are at odds with the requirements of hagiography (280). Hughes sums up the "problem of Jesus" thus: "the same qualities and actions that make him worthy of emulation—and especially those that suggest that he may be both fully God and fully human—make sympathy impossible" (281–82). Even though Jesus, she points out, is "the person with whom the reader is meant to identify" (269), Dickens omits the physical details that evoke Jesus' suffering in the Bible and does not supply "alternative characters" as "points of entry into the narrative for the young reader" (289). "Ironically," she concludes, "we learn from Dickens's Jesus that the best and most effective moral exemplars must also be imperfect" (298).

Intermediality

Approaches to Dickens's works from the point of view that texts are made of and created within networks of other artistic and popular texts and media proliferated in 2015; this section, in fact, is the largest of this survey. Gabriele Rippl's introduction to her collection Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound– Music introduces theoretical terminology and sets of issues that attend this mode of cultural analysis, and so I examine it as an introduction to this section.

Claiming that "literary scholars today have come to accept that media and art forms cannot be analyzed in isolation" but must be considered "against the backdrops of their medial networks," Rippl describes an array of conceptual modes by which such research proceeds (1). She begins with a history. Intermediality studies might be said to have begun in the Classical ut pictura poesis tradition and the Renaissance notion of competitive "sister arts," and to continue through eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century comparative arts studies, all of which addressed literature and the "high arts." However, intermediality studies today, she says, are more "democratic" since they include performances and products of popular culture and new media as well as so-called "high arts" (6). Moving from history to theory, Rippl lays out the various meanings attaching to terms like "medium" and "inter-" versus "pluri-" versus "trans-" mediality, and she presents a pair of theorists' taxonomies. Irina Rajewski's "Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation" (2005) proposes three types "media combination" (works that combine media, like illustrated literary works, opera, and film), "medial transposition" (works that transpose a product into a different medium, like film adaptations of novels or novelizations of films), and "intermedial references" (works that make allusions to other works, ekphrasis, or evocation or imitation of the forms, structures, or effects of another medium). Werner Wolf's "Intermediality" (2005) adds to these three types of "transmediality" other phenomena such as narrativity or specific motifs that appear "across a variety of media" (12). Rippl also explains "four types of discourse on intermediality" (13, Rippl's emphasis)—not what intermediality "is" but models for ways intermediality is discussed: "synthetic," "formal," "transformational," and "ontological" (13–14). Her final two sections identify new areas of research in connection with intermediality (postcolonial studies and narratology) and note that scholars have criticized the concept because it "essentializ[es] media borders and media purism" (16). Such scholars remind us that all conceptions of media are constructed and historically shifting; therefore, theories and typologies can only be "heuristic instruments" (17). Dickens's works have been approached from all these intermedial perspectives in 2015. For "heuristic" convenience, I divide this section into "Dickens, Adapter" (studies of ways Dickens took up other texts or cultural phenomena into his works) and "Dickens, Adapted" (studies of ways Dickens's texts or aspects of texts were taken up into other texts or products of other media).

Dickens, Adapter

Peter Wagner's chapter on Oliver Twist in the Handbook of Intermediality, "The Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Novel," is an excellent study for beginning this section, since he opens with his own discussion of theoretical concepts. He lays out a comparative explication of the three terms "iconotext," "intermediality," and "illustration" in order to demonstrate that Oliver Twist "can be considered as both iconotext and an example of intermediality" (378). An "iconotext," he explains, is a work in which "verbal and visual signs" combine as a "unified system of signification" requiring both words and images (379). Iconotexts are therefore "intermedial," a term he says includes the notion of intertextuality, since both images and texts "are rhetorical and must use signs to express meaning" (379). He cautions us to understand about "illustration" that an image in an "illustrated text" introduces as much meaning as it "clarifies and 'explains'": "The 'excess' of the image—that which cannot be or is not expressed in words—always changes the denotative context and range of the textual meaning" (380).

Wagner reads Oliver Twist as a "middlebrow" novel because in it, he maintains, Dickens makes use of "racist discourses produced by the dominating zeitgeist of his time" instead of questioning them (391). Wagner demonstrates that the representations of Fagin in Dickens's prose and Cruikshank's illustrations depend on anti-Semitic stereotypes that had been in use since the Middle Ages, including those of the greedy, murderous, bestial, vulture-like, or devil-like Jew. While this reading of Fagin is certainly not new, Wagner's discussion of the ways that verbal text and visual images work together in "an iconotextual construction that is tremendously disturbing," not just for its reflection of Victorian attitudes, but also as an influence on the "foundational stereotypes" of "the visual political propaganda of European Fascism" will interest media historians (397).

In "Pickwick Plumbs the Hampstead Ponds: Chapter One in Its Scientific Contexts," Nancy Aycock Metz contextualizes Dickens's satire in the first chapter of Pickwick Papers of the two major scientific associations of the 1830s, the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences. If the Royal Society was criticized for being "naively inductive, fraud and error-prone, trivializing, undirected and randomly accumulative" (290), traits that supply much of the humor in Pickwick's paper on "tittlebats of Hampstead Ponds," the BAAS—formed in order to combat the perceived "decline of science" in England that the Royal Society seemed to embody—attracted criticism as well for the way "ambition and professional rivalry infused scientific discourse" and for the "spectacle" the "gourmandizing scientists themselves" presented in "the travelling circus" of their meetings (284, 290). Metz tracks Dickens's parodies of the language, manners, and even essay titles of both groups in ways that would have been readily recognizable to his novel's original readers (as the early reviews that she quotes demonstrate). Such "preliminary intertextual engagements point Dickens toward what will turn out to be Pickwick's central and certainly its deepest preoccupation," she concludes: Pickwick must learn that "reality cannot exist for him without his own impressions of it" (290).

In "Stupidity and Stupefaction: Barnaby Rudge and the Mute Figure of Melodrama," Carolyn Williams argues for a more cohesive Barnaby Rudge than the usual critical characterization of it as split between melodrama and historical novel. The novel form in fact mixes genres, she reminds us, and in this one the combination aptly follows the content of the story: "history erupts from within the dreaming, uncanny, decaying landscape of the Gothic recurrences and moves into foreground" (370); Barnaby Rudge becomes a historical novel as the Gordon Riots begin. As Dickens's "transformation of the mute figure" of melodrama, Barnaby himself functions as an "empty center through which the forces of history pass" (357, 358). This mute figure of melodrama, Williams explains, is a figure of pathos, of "virtuous suffering," one that gives the melodrama its political power because it "represents those whose 'voice' has been suppressed" (360). Barnaby Rudge contains three kinds of mute figures: Barnaby (the "wise fool"), his pet Grip (who displays the muteness of the automaton), and John Willet (who displays the muteness of stupefaction); together, they help Dickens argue "in a melodramatic register that gives way to a historical one" that historical violence "can be stupidly motivated and is stupefying in its effects" (370). The pathos of Barnaby allows sympathy for those who get caught up in violent upheaval and demonstrates the idea that "historical agency is not a matter of individual will," while John Willet's stupefaction after the riots helps to punctuate the "stupid … contingent … out of control" nature of historical violence (366). "Lukács was wrong" about this novel, she states, arguing that in it Dickens offers a devastating analysis of aristocratic hegemony maintained "at all costs" (369).

In "'What Mockery is this?': Dickens's Talking Bird," Francesca MacKenney focuses on Grip the raven, a figure in Barnaby Rudge that coalesces, she contends, out of two folkoric traditions, the "parroting fool" and the "tradition of the talking bird" (14, 12). (Dickens adapts these traditional figures for other birds and bird-like figures such as Jenny Wren and Miss Flite, as well, MacKenney comments.) Talking birds appear as witness to and spies and commentators on "man's darker dealings," "misdemeanors," "human frailty," and "deceit" (12–13), while "parroting fools" imitate the sounds of words and phrases without understanding their meanings and thus serve as a means to question "man's capacity for reason, independent thought and analysis" (14). Grip similarly exposes "the absurdity of man's behavior, his rhetoric and his conception of himself as a rational creature" (15). MacKenney concludes, using Bakhtin's concept of carnival laughter, that Grip and Barnaby together present "ways of seeing" that threaten the "established norms and limited frames of reference" that in the novel lead to the riots (20).

Rodney Stenning Edgecombe traces the genesis of a figure in Barnaby Rudge from previous stereotypes found in verbal and visual images in "Sources for the Characterization of Miss Miggs in Barnaby Rudge." As Edgecombe demonstrates, in Boz's text and in Phiz's illustrations Miss Miggs comes from a line of "acid Protestant spinsters that march down toward Barnaby Rudge from The Rape of the Lock" (132). These include Pope's personified figure of Ill-Nature, Fielding's Bridget Allworthy, the legend of St. Ursula, and Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. In addition, Edgecombe traces forebears of Hablot Browne's visual images of Miss Miggs in illustrations by Hogarth.

Two scholars make cases for the influence of Medieval works on Dickens's representational strategies, particularly for characterization but also for plot and setting. In "Dickens and Chaucer," Jeremy Tambling "seeks to enlarge critical approaches to Dickens" by demonstrating the pervasive influence of Chaucer that he discovers in many of the novels, although the heart of this article is a reading of the passage in which Dickens introduces the social chorus of Our Mutual Friend in the first of the Veneering dinner parties (42). Tambling establishes points of contact between the two authors, all of which center on the print of the Canterbury pilgrims that Charley Hexam examines in the Veneerings' library. Tambling explains that although the print itself was "almost certainly" Thomas Stothard's "Canterbury Pilgrims Setting Forward from the Tabard Inn" (1806–07) (42), the original conception and design for the image belonged to William Blake, whose analysis of the nature of Chaucer's characterization of his pilgrims influenced the reception of Chaucer by the Romantics and, through them, by Dickens.

Tambling quotes an 1866 letter from Dickens to Sir James Edward Tennent in which Dickens discusses the Pardoner, quoting the relevant lines in Middle English in what Tambling describes as "marvelous evidence of a sensitive use of Chaucer"—a use, he says, that "compels an upwards revaluation of our sense of Dickens's status as an intellectual artist" (54). He illustrates the resemblance to the Pardoner in Fagin, Squeers, Quilp, Tackleton, and Uriah Heep, all of whom display hypocrisy or medieval grotesquerie or monstrosity. The main evidence for this "upwards revaluation," however, comes in Tambling's reading of Chaucerian elements in Our Mutual Friend, "Dickens's most openly Chaucerian text" (55). He notes that at the first Veneering dinner party we find a "retainer" (the Analytical Chemist), a first-time meeting of dinner guests (many of whom become characters), "a residual sense of pilgrimage," and the telling of stories for entertainment (55). The personae in this scene are also "Chaucerian" because what they state about themselves and what we see "do not add up"—as in many of Chaucer's ironically presented pilgrims (57). They seem composed of "Chaucerian" "haphazard assorted details," and the Dickensian narrator, like the Chaucerian one, reports this visible surface without evaluation (57). Tambling concludes his comparison with the similarities between Chaucer's Pardoner and Fledgeby (the beardlessness and the hypocrisy), arguing that the latter is "a working out of what Chaucerian awareness of avarice means in the age of nineteenth-century finance capitalism" (63).

Adina Ciugureanu's "Dantean Echoes in The Old Curiosity Shop" establishes a less purposeful adaptation of Dantean elements in this novel than Tambling establishes with Dickens's reworking of Chaucer, as her metaphor of "echoes" suggests. She posits an identification by Dickens during his journey to Italy with Dante's suffering over the loss of Beatrice because of his own grief over the loss of Mary Hogarth. This sense of shared grief, Ciugureanu suggests, perhaps led to the "echoes" of Beatrice in Little Nell's capacity as moral guide, her journey towards beatification, the presence of an angelic chorus at her death, and her presentation as "the quintessence of purity and love" (128). Ciugureanu notes other echoes from Dante as well, particularly in Hablot K. Browne's illustration of Quilp in chapter 60, which "echoes" John Flaxman's image of Satan in his Compositions from the Divine Poem by Dante (1807).

My own reading of Our Mutual Friend, "Pious Fraud and Secret Chamber: Our Mutual Friend and the Intertextual Marriage Plot" tackles the standard understanding of Dickens's portrayals of courtship and marriage as sentimental and patriarchal by unpacking the way the intertextual allusions made in the course of Bella and John Harmon's story resonated with Dickens and Victorian readers. The four intertexts I treat in detail are John Sheridan Knowles's play The Hunchback, whose protagonists and "pious fraud" plot supply the basic outlines for Bella and John's characterizations and courtship plot; The Thousand and One Nights, the presence of whose Shahriyar-Shahrazad frame story complicates that plot and those characterizations; Charles Perrault's tale "The Blue Beard" as inflected through Dickens's "Captain Murderer" version; and Beeton's Book of Household Management. Together, the latter pair make a gruesome picture of marriage. I conclude that Dickens presents "a more knowing critique of Victorian courtship and marriage, including couverture, and a greater understanding of their costs to men and women" than the standard reading of his marriage plots allows (231).

Dickens, Adapted

In "Dickens' Christmas Story as an Intertexteme in Leskov's Yule Short Story," Natalya N. Starygina and others. conduct a comprehensive study of the way Dickens's Christmas stories provide an intertextual influence on the development of the Russian genre of the Yule short story by "the Russian Dickens," Nikolaj Leskov (195). The authors argue that in Leskov's later works the "plot scheme … changes significantly under the influence of a realistic approach" so that plausible stories happen to ordinary people and the direct expression of a moral by a character gives way to a more implicit didacticism stemming from the regeneration of a morally flawed character (195). Other generic similarities treated by the authors include the presence of the "hierarchical vertical relationship 'a man—God'," expressed in Dickens by "the unity: God and father," and in Leskov in "the trinity … God—a tsar—a father" (198); fuller realizations of the concept of "family" and "home"; and the use of "everyday objects and socio-cultural symbols" in order to portray the characters' socio-cultural environments (199).

Two translation studies track the metamorphosis of Dickens's texts as they are adapted for Portuguese and Polish readers. Alexandra Assis Rosa's "Translating Orality, Recreating Otherness" supplies a fascinating set of examples of how, in standard Portuguese translations of their dialogue, Dickens's low-status characters in Oliver Twist lose the speech patterns that in Dickens's transcription of nonstandard oral English convey their low status and hypocrisy. Rosa concludes, after a comparison of passages across several Portuguese translations, that a "less varied translated text results, which brings speech closer to writing, character diction closer to narratorial diction, and less prestigious or stigmatized discourse closer to the standard, written and most prestigious language use" (222). Aleksandra Budrewicz presents a different kind of textual metamorphosis in Polish translations of The Cricket on the Hearth in "'I Want My Eyes …': Blindness and Perception of the World in Polish Translations of Charles Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth." She, too, attends to the ways Polish translators attempt to convey the idiolect in characters' dialogue, demonstrating that these attempts are largely successful. Her main interest, however, is to explain another difficulty encountered by Polish translators in this particular Dickens text: the Polish word for "blind," "ślepa," has pejorative connotations. This word has largely been replaced in public discourse and therefore also in Hearth translations by the "neutral" and "politically correct" term for "sightless": "niewidomy" (23). This shift leads her to conclude that some "Polish translators … did not escape transforming Dickens's phrases and adapting them to the need of the projected readers" (26).

In "Tapley in the Trenches: Dickens and the Great War," Jerry White traces a detailed reception history of the way Dickens's works were adapted by the British in order to give them comfort and a sense of national identity during the two world wars of the twentieth century. White looks at soldiers' letters, new dramatizations, newspaper articles, records of readings, and new editions of the novels to glean the reasons for the strong revival (even among German readers, it appears) of Dickens's works during World War I but not during World War II. He finds that Dickens's early novels became especially popular because of the way Sam Weller and especially Mark Tapley were construed. Sam's "down-to-earth commonsense, wit and wisdom, and perhaps most of all his loyalty to Pickwick … made him the ideal officer's batman," while Tapley's "persistent buoyancy under duress" supplied a model response "to gloom on the home front or in the trenches" (112). These traits made of such characters the "ideal of the British fighting man" when "the lionisation of the private soldier" was a nearly universal attitude (112). Other traits for which Dickens's works were loved include "his humanism, his appreciation of virtues most readily to be found among the common people rather than the rich and well-bred—honesty, plain speaking, resilience in the face of adversity … [and] above all a generosity of spirit and loathing of cant and mean-mindedness" (112). During World War II, by contrast, White finds that Weller and Tapley had too much of "the cap-doffing subservience to wealth and education that by 1940 had grown stale" (121). Moreover, "[c]ynicism about the purpose and outcome of the first war, and the failure of the post-war settlement to reduce inequality, to house working-class families adequately or even to put men to work, provided infertile soil for the selfless virtues of Mark Tapley and Sam Weller" (121).

Three articles examine changes in illustration practices from first editions to later ones: Joline Zigarovich's "Illustrating Pip and the Terrible Stranger" and Philip V. Allingham's "Changes in Visual Interpretations of A Christmas Carol, 1843–1915: From Realization to Impression" and "Seasonal Tales, Far-Flung Settings: The Unfamiliar Landscapes of The Christmas Books and Stories (1843–1867)." Zigoravich focuses her study on delineations of the opening cemetery scene in Great Expectations, from John McLenan's plate for the Harper's Weekly serialized edition of 1860–61 to a still from David Lean's 1946 film adaptation. She demonstrates the ways that the artists emphasize different dimensions of Pip's relationship to Magwitch, sometimes bringing out or foreshadowing elements of the scene that are only implied or incipient in the text, such as Magwitch's paternal role.

Allingham examines the rich illustration history of A Christmas Carol and other Christmas books and stories in his two articles. In the analysis of Carol illustrations, he demonstrates that principles of illustration shifted after Dickens's death "from realization to free interpretation" and reflected "the growing importance of the family motif and the anti-capitalist agenda" (73). In "Seasonal Tales, Far-Flung Settings," he explores Dickens's and his illustrators' uses of non-urban and foreign settings for the Christmas works more generally, which Allingham speculates might reflect Dickens's anxieties about the five sons who would attempt careers abroad and his interest in such events as the Crimean War and the Sepoy Rebellion. Regarding the relations between the textual and visual presentations of such scenes, Allingham demonstrates that sometimes the two forms are "antiphonal," as with the tension between Clarkson Stanfield's 1844 illustration in picturesque mode of Will Fern's cottage from The Chimes and Fern's own bitterly realistic account of living in rural poverty (35). At other times, Allingham shows, textual and visual modes harmonize, as with E. A. Abbey's "She came to the door quickly and fell upon his neck" from "The Tale of Richard Doubledick," a "female-dominated 'domestic'" scene that emphasizes an important theme for this story and the Christmas works generally: "the necessity for forgiveness" (45). He also examines stories and illustrations set in South America, India, and the Simplon Pass in order to show that post-Dickens illustrators might depart from Dickens's intentions and instead delineate a scene the way "'a mass audience expected things to look'" (51, quoting Henry Pitz's The Brandywine Tradition [1968], Pitz's emphasis).

In "Plagiarizing Pickwick: Imitations of Immortality," Adam Abraham provides an amusing account of the Pickwick imitations that were part of the Pickwick phenomenon, many of which, he demonstrates, take the characters and the premise into radically different racial, sexual, and anti-Semitic territories. Abraham dubs these imitative extensions "Pickwick prostheses" and contends that the writers of such imitations "uncover the Pickwick that they want to read or need to believe or desire," citing the way that the "alcoholic Pickwickians turn water-drinkers" in the work of George W. M. Reynolds, while in that of Thomas Peckett Pres the "already-earthy text is made more so" (18).

Karen E. Laird's monograph The Art of Adapting Victorian Literature, 1848–1920: Dramatizing Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and The Woman in White supplies a minutely researched exploration of the adaptation of Victorian novels for performance. Laird's thesis is that the "language, theory, and practice of adaptation" that led to so many critically- and popularly-acclaimed films in the twentieth century were developed by Victorian stage adapters, although the latter have been buried under a history of contempt or neglect by scholars and critics in the three fields under whose purview they might be said to fall: literary critics, theater historians, and film theorists (2). Laird builds a detailed history of the way the shifts from literary text to film production occurred in its earliest stages, tracing direct lines of influence that run from playwrights and theater managers of the British and American Victorian stage, including George Amar, J. Courtney, John Brougham, F. D. Burnand, and Andrew Halliday, to early British and American film studios like Edison and Britannia, and directors such as Theodore Marston and Thomas Bentley.

Because scholars of theater history, film, and literature have seemed to deplore the early stage adaptation of a Victorian literary work "as the novel's or film's disreputable ghost," no history of these early adaptations exists (2). Laird's approach, to read "theatrical adaptations back through the lens of film criticism" gives us "a much-needed bridge" spanning these disciplines (14). Her findings come from study of such primary material as play and film scripts, playbills, scenarios published in Motion Picture World and Bioscope, correspondence and diaries of those involved in these worlds, and reviews of both plays and films—the latter helping her to understand the way adaptation was discussed by the first generation of film critics. Her interdisciplinary approach demonstrates the ways that adapters "create hybrid works that are newly relevant to a precise historical moment or unique audience, yet that nonetheless stand 'as artworks in themselves'" (15, quoting Sarah Caldwell's Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classical Novel [2002]). The adaptations' relevance results especially from attention to shifts in attitudes regarding gender, class, and nation. The monograph contains two chapters on each novel, one focusing on Victorian stage adaptations and one on early twentieth-century cinematic ones.

In the chapter on Victorian stage adaptations of David Copperfield, Laird demonstrates the ways that "adapters negotiated the formidable tension between the introspective, difficult to adapt Künstlerroman plot with the sensational, highly adaptable fallen woman plot" (77). By 1860, she discovers, playwrights had all but abandoned the former for the latter, and as they complicate the psychologies of "the novel's fallen women, Emily and Martha," they participate in the "evolution" of the fallen woman figure that was occurring throughout the century (78, 77). Andrew Halliday's 1869 production (called Little Em'ly) includes a completely empathetic treatment of the prostitute Martha, while Rosa's class snobbery makes her into the "most symbolically fallen of women, with a heart frozen beyond redemption and a mind steeled against compassion" (104). Laird also charts the development of increasingly sensationalistic stage practices (as pioneered by Boucicault), particularly in the handling of the drowning scene. Meanwhile, Brougham's American staging reworks "the novel's codes of masculinity" with an active "ruggedly masculine" David, who searches for and attempts to rescue Emily, in contrast to Steerforth, an upper-class rake with a misogynistic roving eye. (92). This competition between the man of "intellectual self control" and the man of "passionate action" was typical of the antebellum American stage (94).

Early twentieth-century film adaptations persist in the "gender politics" of the plays, Laird maintains, betraying "a pervasive anxiety about the role of the female characters" (114). However, these productions gradually restore David's story to the center of the narrative via his triangular relations with Agnes and Uriah. These early films also move away from sensation back to social realism in the portrayal of the Peggottys. In addition, Laird traces the development of nationalism in the two film industries of America and Britain, with British cinema already marketing Dickens as a traditional native heritage.

Two articles address modern screen adaptations of Dickens's novels—Natalie Fong's "Great Expectations Realised or Disappointed? Using Screen Adaptations in the Classroom" and Rachel Carroll's "Black Britain and the Classic Adaptation: Integrated Casting in Television Adaptations of Oliver Twist and Little Dorrit." Fong, discussing the pedagogical utility of the 2011 BBC television series and the 2012 BBC film, describes the choices made by the filmmakers in order to adapt the novel for modern television and film audiences and provides a series of ideas for classroom discussion regarding these choices. For example, she proposes launching the comparative exercise by asking students what makes a "good" adaptation. Other suggestions include such topics as the "dangers of an unlikeable protagonist" (47), the handling of Miss Havisham's character, the "effectiveness of each adaptation's visual symbolism" (49), and whether "'sexing up' the text is appropriate" (50).

Rachel Carroll considers the tensions between two possible interpretations of the practice of integrated casting: one, the result of a "representational strategy" that seeks to "make visible the historical presence of a black diaspora in Victorian England"; the other, a "performance practice" that "invites the audience not to see the racial identity of the actor as relevant to his or her role" (16). Her cases are two BBC adaptations, the 2007 Oliver Twist, in which black actor Sophie Okonado plays Nancy, and the 2008 Little Dorrit, in which black actor Freema Agyeman plays Tattycoram—both characters "non-racially marked" in Dickens's narratives (16). Carroll begins her exploration of this tension by examining the convention of fidelity to historical authenticity in British period films. Since there was a substantial black presence via diaspora in Victorian England, although the casts in such films have nevertheless been universally white, she argues that "whiteness" is therefore a "generic trait" and "product of casting conventions" and not true to historical reality (17). The apparent fidelity to historical reality thus "masks what is in truth a fidelity to the generic conventions of the classic adaptations," a convention that creates a picture of Victorians that "erases the historical existence" of non-white British people (17, 18). These two BBC adaptations add a non-white presence to their representations of British Victorians in order to break with this convention and address this erasure. However, Carroll explains, because the roles are not racially marked, the audience is invited not to "see and notice" the non-white presence (26). "Seeing and noticing" the race of an actor cast in such a role can produce the impression that the presence of black British subjects "must in some way be questionable" in history as it seems in the period drama genre (26). She sums up the issue thus: "'Seeing and noticing' the perceived race of an actor can be discriminatory in some contexts but affirming in others," and so we must attend to the implications of "failing to see and notice the absence of non-white actors in classic adaptations" (27). Whether these ground-breaking adaptations serve as "precedents for a more integrated approach" or as "isolated exceptions" remains to be determined (27).

In "The Frozen Deep: Gad's Hill, June –July, 1857," Robert Tracy reviews Sebastian Barry's 2010 play Andersen's English that dramatizes Hans Christian Andersen's disastrous visit to Gad's Hill in the summer of 1857. The play highlights Dickens's dichotomies and contradictory attitudes in ways that make him complex but unlikeable and that "[ask] us to question the Dickens we think we know" (218): he celebrates family life but separates from his wife; he publically welcomes Andersen but privately resents and ridicules him; he creates "an image of a happy life in which he no longer believes"; and he expresses "jingoistic … enthusiasm for British imperialism" (206). Dickens and his household, Tracy says, "become [for Barry] a metaphor for England's oppression of Ireland, an oppression that combines suppression, indifference, and hostility" (217).

Chris Louttit helps us to understand why Dickens's popular reach was so extraordinary in "Popular Dickens: Changing Bleak House for the East End Stage." He demonstrates the way two East End stage versions of the novel draw sharp attention to social issues "of pressing concern to the London poor," even though the productions lack the satirical edge of the third-person narrator and the novel's focus on structural social and political issues (199). The adaptations draw this attention by making more intensely melodramatic the treatment of Jo, who became the "plum part" because his death scene was so poignant and he himself is made "feistier" and turned into a "social critic"—more like Sam Weller or the Artful Dodger than the original character (200, 201).

The Dickensian initiates a new "occasional series" of articles that will transcribe the comments of well-known performers of Dickens's texts in readings or stage or screen adaptations with "Performing Dickens—I: Miriam Margolyes" (230). This initial article of the series provides the thoughts of well-known film and television actor Miriam Margolyes, winner of the 1989 L.A. Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role of Flora Finching in the 1988 film Little Dorrit. Since 1989, Margolyes has been touring internationally with the solo show Dickens's Women, which she created with the late Sonia Fraser, in which she enacts "nearly two dozen characters," and for which she was nominated for an Olivier Award in 1992 (230). Margolyes talks about various aspects of enacting Dickens characters, including choosing the readings, editing texts into scripts, "finding the voices" (which she says "Dickens finds … for" her), and rehearsal practices (231). She reveals that unlike Dickens himself she never uses a mirror because she wants the way she looks in a role to come from the interior, not from the outside.

Mary Hammond's Charles Dickens's Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860–2012 seeks to understand the many afterlives of this "'culture text' which is still being written," a phrase she takes from Paul Davis's The Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (1990), and a developing "meta-text," a term she adapts from Sarah Caldwell's Adaptation Revisited (2002) (3, 13). Hammond sorts her book into five chapters, each of which tracks a phase in this culture text's development, from its checkered first decade as a novel, through its entrenchment as a classic in the twentieth century, and ending with its international afterlives in translations and playful or other kinds of "writings back" by contemporary novelists working in the "neo-Victorian" mode.

Hammond's first chapter addresses the novel's reception and publication history during Dickens's lifetime and portrays the author's smart responses to two situations: the quickly changing reading patterns of the public in what was a volatile publishing market and his competition with "rising stars such as Eliot, whose works he greatly admired" (38). His response to the first situation, Hammond contends, demonstrates a very canny author with "intimate knowledge both of the business end of literature, and of the process of public self-construction" (20). She presents several examples not only of the ways that he and his publishers produced editions of the novel but also encouraged the reprinting of extracts from it in newspapers and journals—a practice that had "the effect of situating it in a discourse of Englishness—and indeed regionalism—which draws attention to his gift for capturing and satirizing the mundane" and "highlighting [his] flashes of humor" (29). In response to the second situation, Hammond discusses the ways Dickens worked to produce a novel "that could be taken seriously and work as a whole, while also still functioning in as broad a range of publishing contexts as possible" (38). The ways that this novel "looks forwards and backwards," the presence in it of several plots whose "narrative energy" is "unfulfilled," and the equivocal ending(s) contributed to its richness "for potential adapters" (33).

In chapter 2, Hammond examines the distinct responses to Dickens's death in the U.K. and the U.S. that shaped the production of new editions and stage adaptations. In the U.K., the proliferation of editions of his complete works, along with introductions by his contemporaries or respected critics, "set a trend for guided interpretations of 'classic literature'" in response to the sense that Dickens was a national treasure and that "recognising [his] genius made one an Englishman" (56, 48). In the U.S., the press was much concerned with his personal life and "highlighting the problem of how a [post-Civil War] reforming national identity could accommodate a widely revered but unorthodox outsider" (51). New illustrations also spoke to new generations. On both sides of the Atlantic, Hammond notes, the novel was fast becoming an important cultural reference—including the phrase "great expectations" itself, whose many meanings she unpacks interestingly.

Hammond's discussion of nineteenth-century stage adaptations sets these remediations of the novel into the context of rapid change in the theatrical world, which was attempting to "make the stage respectable again" and "give dramatists more aesthetically important work" (67). This dynamic also obtains in the early film and radio adaptation history she describes in chapter 3. Film adaptations of Dickens's works came to be viewed as "cultural/historical events" with educative value and thus a potentially positive influence "on the morals of audiences" (87, 91). Thus, the needs of the film industry fed the growth of the novel's status as a "classic." In the wake of Alec Guinness's stage production in 1939 and David Lean's 1945 film, Dickens's late novels achieved new status in Britain at a time of "national identity … under siege," "colonial disintegration," and "dire economic straits" (111). As the BBC began adapting Dickens for television, it "tapped into this complex matrix," one that included as well a "nationally constituted and deeply class-based aversion to Hollywood" (111).

Chapter 4 explains how the novel became fixed as a classic in the twentieth century. Adaptations placed Dickens in a "unique" position among Victorian novelists, since he came to be considered both "'classic' literature and an everyman's favourite" (121). Lean's film, Hammond says, was the key to the "tidal wave of new interest" in his work and to the re-evaluation of Victorian authors generally in the post-war period (113). The chapter then turns to television, an important medium for classic novel adaptation because the serialization format reproduces "the languorous feeling associated with reading" (132). As with the earlier film and stage adaptations that "remediated" the media themselves, so with television, which gained cultural capital from the classic works that aired.

If Hammond's first four chapters reveal the process by which Great Expectations became a "popular classic" despite a long initial period of unpopularity, her final chapter examines this process outside the Anglophone world. Here, she discusses translations and film adaptations in many cultures, from China to Poland to India and Japan, some of which fit the "postcolonial critical model" while others do not (170). She tracks, for example, the ways translations shift—as do the paratexts guiding readers through them—in accordance with cultural shifts in the new culture. In both China and Poland, for example, the novel was translated far more often once these two nations had split away from Soviet influence.

Every chapter of this well-researched, thoughtful book contains fascinating stories of the many journeys Dickens's narrative has taken and the ways it has metamorphosed along the route. Hammond closes the book with a call for more research into the details of such histories, claiming that the novel

is clearly still now what it has always been: a rich and clever book not only thematically, but also structurally. Tailor-made to fit a wide range of different media contexts in 1860, it continues to do so in 2014. … In the end, this innate responsiveness to historical needs may be Great Expectations' most lasting legacy, as well as the root of a large part of its author's gift.

(196–97)

I close this section with a cluster of articles published in the December issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century that report quite fascinatingly on the "Our Mutual Friend Tweets" project that grew out of the recent serial online reading of that novel run by Birkbeck, University of London. (I review Ben Winyard's discussion of this and the University of Leicester's serial online reading project of A Tale of Two Cities in my "Modes of Reading" section below.) Emma Curry, who organized the Twitter accounts, assigned the characters to readers, applied the online platform Storify to collect all the tweets and assemble them into a narrative (thus taking on "the kind of 'omniscient' narratorial voice that is a key element of many of Dickens's novels"), and tweeted as Lizzie Hexam, supplies an overview of the reasons for and general effects of the project. The most salient of the latter, she states, was the "fresh approach to reading" Dickens's novel that developed—a "crowd-sourced close reading (close tweeting, perhaps)" that "has come to occupy a curious middle ground between re-enacting and adapting Dickens's novel." Readers who requested to participate in the project were assigned characters in whose personae they would tweet about "what had happened to them in that particular instalment" or "what their character might have been occupied with during the rest of the month, or during the instalments in which they played no role." Curry discusses several ways in which Dickens's works seem ideally matched with the idioms and effect of Twitter. Like his novels, it "creat[es] and connect[s] communities of readers around the globe"; it encourages "performances of the self," a tendency that is "particularly strongly realized" in Our Mutual Friend with its pious and other kinds of frauds; it creates an interest in "the kinds of relationships between individuals" that similarly interested Dickens and was the focus of all his work; and it encourages the kind of whimsical verbal facility for which he is so famous. Finally, as Curry found when she had to begin assigning readers roles of nearly-animate objects (such as the items in Mr. Venus's shop) because so many people wanted to participate (51 was the total), this project also reflects the way "forces of animacy frequently fluctuate between bodies and objects" in Dickens's imagination.

One advantage of the project, as all the articles in the cluster attest, was the way that it allowed readers to fill in the gaps that appear in any narrative. There was plenty of leeway, for example, for readers to develop individual idioms, voices, and interests for their characters, with some staying carefully embedded in period context, others plunging into contemporary Twitter idiom, and still others mashing up the two. Side conversations developed (such as the one Melissa Symanczyk reports having in her role as Mr. Venus's alligator with Mr. Inspector in her "Reflections of a Sawdust-Filled, Six-Foot, Tweeting Taxidermy Alligator"), and eccentric yet, revealing angles on the novel also appeared: Symanczyk observes that for her, the novel is now "about a lonely taxidermist in a dark London shop, trying to do the right thing and trying to find love, surrounded and supported by his inanimate compatriots." Similarly, aspects of the texts that are only implicit or underdeveloped became major elements of Twitter reenactment and adaptation. Holly Furneaux, who tweeted as Mortimer Lightwood, reports her ability to pursue more fully his love "for the 'friend he has founded himself on'" in "Mortimer Lightwood; or, Seriality, Counterfactuals, Co-Production, and Queer Fantasy." Main characters, too, were opened up, as Beatrice Bazell reports in "Being Bella: Adventures in the Dickensian 'Twittersphere'." She plunged Bella into the clothing fashions and cultural events of the time. "[W]hat a godsend Bella's 1864 accession to wealth was!" Bazell reports, as she herself had just embarked on the research for a chapter in her thesis on fashion of the 1850s and 1860s, an interest that "represents the sense of freedom which Bella's newfound wealth brings her, but also its spurious value and transitory beauty," since "her characteristic playfulness suffers from being surrounded by so much luxury." And, as Peter Orford reports in "Being John Rokesmith," a new appreciation for Dickens's narratorial genius developed:

I tell you it is a task of considerable difficulty to report on events with full knowledge of secret identities and plots in such a way so as not to spoil the plot for first-time readers. The purpose of setting us free on Twitter was to allow access to the inner thoughts of characters, but I could hardly blurt out I was John Harmon from the start now, could I? Thus, for the entire first half of the book, I had to simultaneously uphold the masquerade of not being John Harmon without openly contradicting my true identity. And then when dear old Boffin pretended to dismiss me, again I had to tweet in such a way that could be read the first time as genuine mortification but reread with hindsight as calm acceptance of an agreed plan under way: if this entanglement with first-person revelations (or lack of them) has taught me anything, it is that I shall read David Copperfield with renewed respect after this ordeal, I assure you.

(Orford's emphasis)

Curry closes her overview with a reflection on the pedagogical potential for projects like this one, including such considerations as "building rapport across academic and non-academic communities, and across time zones," "encouraging students (and scholars more broadly) to work together to enrich and develop each other's work," the "dynamism" that results in a "whole being greater than its parts," and not least the "whimsical potential of Twitter" to keep us all "alive to the humorous and entertaining nature of Dickens's original texts."

Modes of Reading

The act of reading considered as as an individual or community psychological, cognitive, sociological, or creative phenomenon drew the attention of several studies in 2015, ranging from analysis of Dickens's own reading-to-revise as revealed in manuscript study, to the reading strategies invited by his texts or engaged in by his characters, to the experiences of reading Dickens in communities literal and virtual.

Matthew Bradley and Juliet John's collection Reading and the Victorians, which addresses the history of reading, contains three chapters featuring Dickens. Philip Davis's chapter "Deep Reading in the Manuscripts: Dickens and the Manuscript of David Copperfield" has two important reasons for sending us into Dickens's "manuscript revisions and corrections" of David Copperfield (65). First, they "offer clues and inferences as to imagined reception"; second, and most importantly, they reveal Dickens as a "scrupulous and uniquely expert reader" of his own work who "turn[s] the act of reading into the act of reformulation in order to achieve a higher level of realization" (65). And what an expert reader Davis demonstrates himself to be while he reveals Dickens's expertise. This essay presents a vivid portrait of the writer "achieving" the text, something Davis himself achieves by reading with minute attention the additions and deletions Dickens makes (65). What emerges is a "master-class in … mental prompts and shifts … as the essence of literary thinking" (65). He shows that "Dickens's additions are often to do with two connected matters: with temporal shifts and added meta-levels, offering a double density of story-forward and recall-backward in emphatic denial of the simple linear straightforwardness of time, of sentences and of narrative" (67).

In revising, Dickens calls upon what Davis terms "a second mind" or alternatively, "the psychology of grammar": "the mentality involved in the very shaping and registering of the sentences, in the felt insertion of subordinate clauses or tiny qualifications en route" (73, 70). Such revisions show the writer working toward the fullest realization of a character's psychology and condition—as Davis shows Dickens doing with David Copperfield—and working, too, to create the most fully imagined realism. Davis connects this study of the micro to a broader consideration of form in a discussion of the moment when David confronts Steerforth's betrayal (the opening of chapter 32). (I go to a lengthy quotation here, simply to give a sample of the elegance of Davis's analysis and prose.)

In the face of a severely disorienting experience which does not fit with the assumptions of the past, the challenge here is how to maintain some vestige of loyalty to the memory of Steerforth which is not, on the other hand, a childish recidivism or a betrayal of reality's effects. It becomes a syntactic challenge to find room for the painfully torn and uncategorized space in between the faculties of abiding affection and conclusive judgment, a transitional place wherein the protagonist does not know quite what to think and yet knows it is psychically important to find out. That space has no name but it is the place where memory asks story whether anything is more than the outcome of what it has finally become; whether the retaining of some value to Steerforth—of what he was before this and might have been on that basis—is anything other than regression to that childish adoration of David's schooldays; whether there can be any dimension for weighing human life other than the reality of result in linear time. That is the challenge for Victorian realist fiction: to find within the linearity of sentence, time and story, within the depiction of an ordinary world, levels and dimensions of being that are something other than dismissively transient. This required strong and subtle writers, revising the common framework of understanding even while working within it; and it required also good readers to recognize that subtle inner work.

(76; Davis's emphasis)

Sheila Cordner's chapter, "Reading across the Lines and off the Page: Dickens's Model of Multiple Literacies in Our Mutual Friend," takes us from Dickens as reader of his own work to Dickens as portrayer of reading within his work, arguing that in Our Mutual Friend he explores various modes of literacy and encourages readers to think about which of these "are lost in the process of acquiring textual literacy" (89). Cordner sets her argument in the context of mid-nineteenth-century debates about "how much to depend on one's own observations and how much weight to put into received authority" (89). Claiming that relying solely on one or the other is "unacceptable to Dickens," she argues that in Our Mutual Friend the heroes and heroines are "readers who espouse and appreciate multiple modes of interpretation" (91). Lizzie is Dickens's model of an "ideal reader" because she uses "observational, imaginative, social, and textual" literacies (96).

Elisha Cohn also discusses multiple "modes of reading" within a Dickensian text in "Suspending Detection: Collins, Dickens, and the Will to Know." (I take my title for this section from one of the section titles in her essay.) Cohn explains that the detective form traditionally "provokes the will to knowledge," a "[habit] of mind associated with the rise of empiricism and central to what Elaine Hadley has identified as English 'liberal cognition'" (253, citing Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain [2010]). The Moonstone and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, however, question and complicate this standard association with the form, since "a logic of suspension [of knowledge] defers the urgent pleasures of suspense" and the central plot device of each work "turns on the psychology of unconsciousness" (256, 253). In short, revelation is not the goal of these mysteries. Cohn explains Victorian physiological theories of unconscious and diminished states of consciousness, which held that such states could also produce "cognition" and "moral strength" (258), in order to argue that Collins and Dickens both question this idea by emphasizing the "fragility of the willed pursuit of knowledge" (260).

Here, Cohn takes a look at "modes of reading," connecting the mode that leads to mastery to empiricism on one hand and imperialism on the other. Moonstone and Drood, she contends, invite instead a Barthesian mode of rereading that "multiplies the meanings of a text," "defer[s] signification," and "prefer[s] the 'ludic' pleasures of observing how textual patterns respond to the patterns of a reader's own attention" (261). In their preference for the latter mode of reading, these texts suggest, Cohn argues, that national consciousness is a "precarious aspiration rather than a cognitive reality" (265). Cohn sees Drood as a "unique tool for questioning the value of end-driven reading" because it is unfinished (269), its narrative structure "suspends rather than resolves the fractures of consciousness," and because it "enters no mind adequate to trace the relationship between cause and effect, circumstance and conclusion" (269). She concludes by suggesting that the "depiction of suspended, rather than suspenseful, states of mind offers perhaps a richer intimation of the ranges of embodied being in the Victorian novel than if we read more urgently for the political outcome" (273).

Using "cognitive poetics" and "corpus stylistics," Peter Stockwell and Michaela Mahlberg contend that we can track the workings of the affective and intentional fallacies in "Mind-Modelling with Corpus Stylistics in David Copperfield." Cognitive poetics uses phenomena revealed by cognitive psychology to explain literary effects. In this study, the authors use "mind-modelling," a "fundamental feature of consciousness" that gives us the ability to recognize others as people by creating in our own minds a "working model" of their psychologies and behaviors (132). This feature of human cognition appears, they say, not just in encounters with other real people but also with the textual cues that create the effect of a person in literary characters. In order to collect and study textual cues that would allow a reader to mind-model a character, Stockwell and Mahlberg employed a computer program, the CLiC tool (Corpus Linguistics in Cheshire, "developed for the exploration of nineteenth-century fiction"), which finds and assembles all the textual traces of a character in a novel or story (129). Their case study is David Copperfield's Mr. Dick, and they limit the cues to textual references to Mr. Dick aside from his direct speech. They see a couple of patterns: Mr. Dick and David quite often "mirror each other's actions or perceptions" and Mr. Dick is most frequently associated with mental processes and states of mind rather than physical actions (135). The authors explain that "the readerly effect is a sense of a high level of gestural mirroring and foregrounding of mentality" (139). With this hard data, in other words, they have been able to make concrete the way the text creates a specific impression in the reader. The authors suggest that this kind of study can also supply hard evidence of authorial intention, since a reader, in order to mind-model Mr. Dick, must simultaneously mind-model his narrator David Copperfield; moreover, both Mr. Dick and David are produced in a text generated by an "authorial mind" (143). Thus "mind-modelling Mr. Dick and David Copperfield also involves meta-modelling of such mirroring and textual patterns, and assigning them to the mind of Dickens" (143). Readers, therefore, build "authorial intention in exactly the same way as we mind-model both fictional characters and real-life people" (143).

From one form of computer-assisted reading to another: in "'May We Meet Again': Rereading the Dickensian Serial in the Digital Age," Ben Winyard describes two serial online reading projects, one following A Tale of Two Cities, hosted by the University of Leicester and Dickens Journals Online, and another, following Our Mutual Friend, and lasting from May 2014 to November 2015, run by Birkbeck, University of London. In both projects, the serial readings matched the original weeks and months of publication. Both projects included a blog space where readers could post and comment on their experiences, and, in the Our Mutual Friend project, a concurrent Twitter project allowed some readers to tweet their own alternative tellings of the story in the personae of Dickens's characters—or objects, such as Silas Wegg's wooden leg. (My review of the published account of the latter experiences concludes the "Intermediality" section of this survey above.) Winyard discusses several effects such projects produce in readers: they create a seeming recovery of "lost authenticity" from reading these works in the same increments and timing as did Dickens's contemporaries (and so produce a fantasy of "reading originally"); they can "defamiliarize" these long works by breaking them into short reading sessions separated by intervals that get filled with "speculation and fantasy"; and they create a reading community in which "emotional and social bonds" have been created by the imaginative work such as the one Dickens himself sought to build and strengthen.

Winyard presents this material through the lens of Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time (1998), which introduces the concept of "technics" in order to explore relationships among "the body, environment, and technology." Stiegler explains that the "materialization" and "exteriorization" of thought always requires technology of some kind, and that the digital era has merely produced "a new mode of technicity" that carries in its wake the same anxieties about memory and attention that previous technologies carried in the past. Stiegler compares current worries about what the internet "is doing to our brains" to Plato's objections to writing. Winyard concludes that serial online reading projects "can transform us into 'producers rather than consumers of meaning'" (quoting Rebecca Solnit's "Woolf's Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable" [2014]).

From virtual reading communities to physical ones: Susan Cook and Elizabeth Henley describe in "Reading Communities in the Dickens Classroom" a pair of connected projects (one oral, the other digital) that Cook ran in a class on Dickens that included "Dickensian reading communities and digital interactions" as objects of study (331). Students examined Victorian oral reading practices and then performed in "classroom, school-wide, and community-based" oral readings for the oral project and collaborated in virtual classroom communities on "group online projects of their own design dedicated to one aspect of Dickens's work" in the digital project (332). The twin assignments included the necessity for students to compare the Victorian oral practices with the new media projects in terms of the ways each created a community of readers. Cook and Henley report that, contrary to their expectation, the oral project "fostered a sense of classroom community, which was… echoed in the digital projects, rather than the other way around," suggesting that digital projects need to be supported by "other community-building exercises" (333). They found that students distinguish their "academic online selves from their social media selves" and so "need help connecting their online communities to their other communities and help seeing the connections between types of online communities—if this is what we all desire" (348). Setting this pedagogy in the context of the crisis faced by the humanities in higher education, Cook and Henley argue that comparative projects like these can help convince students and their parents that the learning in face-to-face classes is "different from the learning that takes place on your phone," and that "this learning is worth the massive expense of a face-to-face education" (340). Designing digital projects that are not just "add-on[s]" but are integrated into course themes, they contend, can help with this convincing (341).

Out of the classroom and into the community: Clare Ellis describes the experiences of a community reading group in "The Sharing of Stories, in Company with Mr. Charles Dickens." The readings occurred through the sponsorship of Get Into Reading, the "leading social outreach programme" of The Reader Organization in London (143). The members of these reading groups fall into "one of the highest indexes of multiple deprivation across the U.K."—readers with "mixed … literacy levels" and "diagnosable level of depression" who are "often unemployed," "vulnerably housed," "isolated," and lacking university education (144–45). These readers, therefore, turn to the books as "a life resource, intuitively pulling out the bits which have some personal resonance with their own lives, feelings and thoughts and which they can … take away with them and use to help them through their difficulties" (145). All reading is done aloud during the group's weekly ninety-minute meetings by a trained facilitator and by any group members "tak[ing] turns as they wish" (144). Thus, the format of the meetings suits the weekly serialization of Dickens's text well, since the group read Great Expectations. Ellis reports that the group was excited to tackle a "classic," although only one member had read it before and some had seen film adaptations. All had heard of it and of Dickens himself, and its status as "classic," Ellis writes, made them assume it would be "outside their own reading experiences to-date and … outside of their own everyday realities": "It was partly identified as 'Other' and yet partly embraced for this very Otherness as well" (147). Ellis finds that what Dickens offers to such readers is "an exploration of the fundamental elements of human experience" that is presented in a "uniquely theatrical language" that allows readers "to confront even the darkest … scenes of human suffering" (155). The worlds the novels portray also include such a multiplicity of scenes, characters, and feelings that they "allow readers to confront and think about sorrow amidst the myriad of life that also involves other feelings" and so "any possibility of becoming entrapped in a monolith of sorrow is denied" (155).

Andrew Elfenbein provides a long view of the history of responses to novel-reading in "Reading Novels, Alone and in Groups," one that traces the origins and development of both Victorian and contemporary readers' responses to the novel form. Drawing evidence from readers' journals and letters, he shows that when the form was new, readers tended to enjoy the entertainment it offered, but doubted "whether or not they were worth the time"—the doubts themselves providing the pleasure of "manifest[ing] critical acumen" (325). The two phenomena that appear in eighteenth-century responses that persist into later periods, he finds, are that readers perceive "redeeming moral values" in novels and believe that "everyone else [is] reading them" (325). The latter phenomenon reinforces the shared experience that novel-reading can be, making it "good for friendship" (325). The capacity to absorb readers' full attention—to take them out of time and place—became important in the nineteenth century, as the prestige of the form rose. While absorption is deep, later memory of the novel is spotty, however, with readers remembering "a particular character, event, or line" rather than the arc of plot (329). Elfenbein points to Dickens's Wellerisms and one reader's close identification with David Copperfield as examples. In the twentieth century, novel-reading became serious business, a powerfully improving experience, alongside worries that the novel-reading audience was disappearing. Dickens's novels achieve classic status and so become frequent choices for literacy projects, school curricula, book clubs, and so forth, while the old "anti-novel rhetoric … has found new targets: television, hip-hop, violent video games, and pornography" (334).

In "'Living by Wit' and 'Knight of Industry': Some Notes on the History in Two Dead Metaphors," Jonathan P. A. Sell recovers the "larger social history" of "wit" and "industry" as valued or devalued faculties or character traits from the uses of the two "dead metaphors" of his title (121). (Because our uses of and responses to these traits are often related to reading, I consider Sell's article in this section.) The essay begins with a capsule history of "wit," beginning with its "apogee" in the sixteenth century as "the prerequisite of metaphor" and thus the capacity to think of new things (123). In this period, its meanings multiplied, so that it referred not just to mental faculty but also to brilliance of expression. The latter meaning presages the gradual erosion of its status as "an instrument for seeking truth" in the seventeenth century because of the twin ascents of empiricism ("in an age of science … wit led away from the truth" [127]) and Protestant bourgeois morality (which associated "wit" with libertinism) (124). It falls lowest in the nineteenth century when living by one's wit became associated either with the sharp practices of the speculators and con men in finance capitalism or the ingenuity of engineers and manufacturers. Sell reads Little Dorrit through the latter lens, demonstrating that the characters who live by wit are the "sharpers, swindlers, and rakes"—Blandois/Rigaud, Mr. Dorrit, Henry Gowan, and Mr. Merdle—and then in contrast (but esteemed no more highly by his world) the ingenious engineer Daniel Doyce, who must go abroad to develop his ideas and gain the recognition he deserves (132). Meanwhile, "industry" rises as "wit" falls, along with the hard work of empirical scientific practices and the Protestant work ethic, both demonstrated in Robinson Crusoe's ingenio. "Industry," too, inspires ambivalence among Victorians, Sell points out, since it "could never be divorced from commercialism" (135). He concludes that these "dead metaphors can bring aspects of history, and themselves, back to life" when we attend to their uses and appearances in literary texts (121).

Bodies

One way in which work on Dickens in 2015 reflects shifting interests in literary criticism generally is a turn away from abstract theory to an interest in the material, the literary handling of such subjects as "animals," "things," "cities," and "spaces." This section on "Bodies," therefore, includes studies that in the past might have fallen into categories called (more abstractly) something like "Empire and Race," or "Sexuality and Gender." Dickens criticism continues to attend to bodies in their dimensions of race, sexuality, and gender, but has also begun to include studies of the representation of bodies in parts, bodies as "disabled," and bodies as "things." I sort this section accordingly. (Since I also have a section on "Empire," an explanation about the way I distinguish work on racialized bodies from work on empire might be helpful. If the main interest of a study is on imperialist or colonial practices and policies or on places in the world conceived as "spaces," I have included it in the "Empire" section. If the interest fall substantially on individual characters or people rather than policy or space, I have included it here.)

Race

In "'The Other Woman'—Eliza Davis and Charles Dickens," Murray Baumgarten explores the correspondence between Dickens and Eliza Davis, the Jewish woman who was instrumental in getting Dickens to create the sympathetic figure of Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend. Two theses animate Baumgarten's analysis. The first is a detailed and rich portrait of Mrs. Davis's mind and character, which allows Baumgarten to claim that her letters "reveal the increasing self-confidence of English Jews" despite the anti-Semitic culture in which they were submerged (44). Mrs. Davis, he demonstrates, "had no qualms about taking on Charles Dickens" and was "equally quick to praise when praise was due" (59). Possessed of exquisite social skills and cultural erudition (as we would now call her savoir faire), she raised Dickens's awareness of the stereotypes he had used in creating Fagin and of their debilitating consequences. By appealing to his ethical sense and his desire to "reinforce [his] legacy of benevolence" as demonstrated by his vehement public opposition to slavery, she inspired not only the creation of Riah as a benevolent anti-stereotype, but also, Baumgarten shows, many of the ideas Riah expresses as he undergoes his own enlightenment about the effects of behaving in accordance with that stereotype on the public imagination regarding his people (53). The other thesis is that while Riah "extends the range of characters in the novel," he "does not make up for Fagin" (59, 61). He cannot, Baumgarten explains, because he is only an individual whose status is "a wish-fulfillment" and a "fairy-godmother" (61). His presence in the novel, however benevolent, "leaves the cultural practice—the social system—intact" (62). Baumgarten includes as appendices a transcription of Eliza Davis's letters to Dickens and to his daughter Mamie and an "Eliza Davis Family Tree" in order to bring her into clearer focus as another important "other woman" who inspired and influenced his work.

Laura Korobkin reveals the reverse tendency regarding the disjunction that can occur between attitudes towards a race in the abstract and toward individual members of that race in "Avoiding 'Aunt Tomasina': Charles Dickens Responds to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Black American Reader, Mary Webb." Baumgarten's study reveals in Dickens a positive disposition towards an individual Jewish woman resulting in a benevolent Jewish character as an attempt to overcome pernicious anti-Semitic stereotyping; Korobkin's study reveals a personal, private antipathy toward individuals of African descent in Dickens despite his well-known public (and passionately expressed) abolitionist stance toward that race as a people. Korobkin's article recounts an event in which Dickens refused to sponsor an American mixed-race public reader and actress, Mary Webb, who was known for her readings from Shakespeare's works and from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Webb possessed a letter of introduction from Dickens's friend Lord Carlisle, and Dickens wrote to him to explain his refusal. The bulk of Korobkin's essay is a close reading of this letter. She unpacks Dickens's very "complex response" that is coded into the letter in order to "provide an unpleasant reality check to the … reports by black American visitors to Britain in this period that they were welcomed and accepted without racial prejudice" (116). As she observes, Dickens "goes out of his way" to deny "the individuality, respectability and shared cultural citizenship" that Webb's request claims, and Korobkin finds several underlying causes for this denial (116): an apparent repugnance towards black people, a disdain for radical abolitionism, and behind these a sense of rivalry with Harriet Beecher Stowe for "the readership and affections of the British public" (132). (Stowe composed the one-woman reading script from Uncle Tom's Cabin for Webb.) Korobkin concludes that "[r]eductive racism … is a personal strategy for self-protection and self-reinforcement as well as an expression of racial repugnance" (133).

In "Beyond the Pale: Edwin Drood and the 'Sanctity of Human Life'," Gerard Cohen-Vrignaud argues that Dickens mounts a pointed critique of his culture's racialized ideas about who was "humane" (the British) and who was "brutal" (Others), suggesting that "Dickens—in this novel, at least—is not as jingoistic as he may have been in real life" (285). The "denial of British inhumanity" that underlies the tenets of liberalism, Cohen-Vrignaud argues, allows the "scapegoating" of Neville Landless, "the false suspect identified as 'un-English'" (277). This hypocrisy appears most fully in the novel's satirical treatment of both its liberal humanitarian Honeythunder and its Tory constitutionalist Sapsea. In both figures, "an abstract attachment to humanity" reinscribes "an affective politics of tribal boundary-drawing and purification," since both assume Neville's guilt because of the color of his skin (277, 280). Cohen-Vrignaud grounds this analysis on a close reading of the novel's opening impalement fantasy which, with its "juxtaposition of Gothic tower and impaling Turkish spike," problematizes the "very dualities that give us the most comfort about the progress of our species" (293).

Gender

In Intimate Violence and Victorian Print Culture: Representational Tensions, Suzanne Rintoul explores the tensions in representations of "intimate violence" (abuse of women by their sexual partners) between the impulse to "discuss and depict what was understood as a uniquely private form of abuse" and an "equally imperative mandate to keep it private and thus outside of public discourse" (3). Rintoul looks for ways that the vulnerable female body could be made to "signify more than vulnerability" (10), and she brings the Foucauldian insight (from The History of Sexuality [1978]) that "power is always at work in all relationships, and it moves in multiple directions" to bear on her investigations (5). She argues that highlighting these competing impulses can reveal the ways that "portrayals of battered women facilitated sedition and, ultimately, alternative paradigms for social and cultural hierarchy" (5). Helping her to this understanding is her particular stance within feminism, according to which she can see in representations an encouragement to oppose the oppression of women whether the author or artist has intended such opposition or not. Her study addresses many kinds of print culture, including broadsides, political pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and novels, and while she notes the distinctions among these varied genres in terms of purpose and audience, her interest falls particularly on the techniques they share. One of these techniques is sensationalism, a mode of representation that constructs the violated female body in such powerfully emotional ways that it can "undermine traditional structures and norms" (11). The traditional structures and norms Rintoul most frequently sees being destabilized are those of gender and class hierarchies.

When she gets to Oliver Twist, she shows that novel's handling of intimate violence is "position[ed]," like the Newgate Calendar, "at the nexus of the shared culture of working- and middle-class subjects" (43). She contextualizes her reading of the novel with a comparison of the Newgate Calendar and broadside versions of the same crime. Her discussion shows that the Calendar presents the working-class bodies of both the murdered woman and her murderer in purely bodily terms (as was typical of portrayals of the working class), while the broadside version renders the class status ambiguous, showing that "attitudes about the physicality of the poor were not so cut and dry as they may have appeared, and that instead the body can be read … as a space through which boundaries can be called into question" (51). She supplies other accounts and images that portray women's "denigrated bod[ies]" with "conspicuously contradictory markers of class" (53). Nancy's murder resembles these because it, too, emphasizes her working-class status while portraying her with the traits associated with the "Angel in the House." Thus, even though Nancy "is not allowed to remain in the text" (54), she becomes a ghost haunting Sikes, a status that suggests "Nancy's capacity to align with the non-bodily and the bodily as a woman who resonates with the angelic middle-class and the bodily working-class prostitute" (58). Even though Nancy dies, Rintoul concludes, Dickens delineates her character in ways that illustrate the "disruptive potential of the dichotomous woman" and so "condemn[s] the refusal of Victorian society to embrace the complex identities of working-class women" (58).

In "Dombey and Son: An Inverted Maid's Tragedy," Taher Badinjki argues that Dickens's humanitarianism led him to change his original intention that Edith would become Carker's mistress because "in engaging the reader's sympathies, [he] had entrapped his own" (210). By endowing both Alice Marwood and Edith Dombey with "innate feminine tenderness and capacity for affection" (213), Badinjki argues, Dickens succeeds in creating sympathy for these "fallen" women, whose condition and stories are so parallel (both sold into prostitution or on the marriage market by avaricious mothers), among "the family circle of readers" who might otherwise object to them on moral grounds (213).

Tara MacDonald's The New Man, Masculinity and Marriage in the Victorian Novel supplies a much-needed history of the models of masculinity that shifted as models of femininity did. MacDonald grounds her history of the New Man in a theory of changing gender models that eschews the term "crisis," adopting instead a terminology of compromise and negotiation that is more suited to her subject: how this figure evolves from shifting ideas about the "gentleman" and how writers incorporate this new figure into their fiction. The figure himself was gentle, domestic, interested in companionate marriage, sexually self-disciplined and patient, nurturing and sensitive. Much satirized as "the effeminate and ridiculous partner of the manly and frightening New Woman," he also presented difficulties for the New Woman herself (2). If his gentleness was at odds with traditional masculinity, his status as the New Woman's partner "risked challenging the heroine's desire for independence"—and so, as MacDonald trenchantly observes, "he was ill-fitted for either the traditional Victorian marriage plot novel or the New Woman bildungsroman" (2).

MacDonald begins her account with the origins of the late-century New Man in the midcentury New Gentleman, a figure she places in the context of feminist attempts to improve the condition of married women and in the new ideals of middle-class masculine self-discipline—sexual as well as professional—that were promoted by the likes of Samuel Smiles. Dickens appears in her first chapter as a mid-century author finding ways to make New Gentlemen into viable characters. Reading David Copperfield as a New Gentleman bildungsroman, she explains that David's progress can be charted through the various models of masculinity that he encounters and rejects or adopts. Steerforth represents his earliest model, one that embodies the traditional rapacious rank-based rake. Uriah Heep presents the middle-class industriousness that David needs to learn, but this is coupled with a sexual impatience that must be rejected. It is Tom Traddles, in this reading, who presents the ideal that David absorbs. Traddles has all the "sexual constancy and compassion," "moral resolve," "professional industriousness," and "soft[ness]" that the New Gentleman was supposed to exhibit (20, 42). Because this figure combined elements of traditional feminine ideals with masculine ones, MacDonald argues, David himself must learn to be guided by his "sisters": his fictional sister Betsey (invented by Betsey Trotwood) and his "sister" Agnes.

Dickens makes Traddles a secondary character, the usual solution writers find to the narrative problem presented by the New Gentleman. So, too, does he deal with Herbert Pocket, the character MacDonald turns to in her analysis of Great Expectations. The fault lines of this problematic figure are clearer in Herbert, since Dickens presents in him a "gentleness" that seems "at odds with a demanding market economy" (54). Thus, with Herbert, MacDonald claims, a less optimistic Dickens "revises Traddles's optimistic rise to professional success" (53). In later chapters, MacDonald goes on to demonstrate the ways the New Gentleman evolved into the New Man in New Woman writers' work. Both New Man and New Woman figures are thus important, she contends, to the transition from Victorian to Modernist novels.

Sexuality

Why, Goldie Morgentaler asks in "A Tale of Two Dwarfs: Sex, Size and the Erotics of Transcendence," does diminutive size seem to equate to moral perversity, particularly sexual immorality, in Dickens's imagination? The question arises as she contemplates Quilp and Miss Mowcher, both dwarfs and both presented "within the realm of a perverse and malevolent sexuality" (199). Morgentaler locates the origins of this notion about people of diminutive size in the folk and fairy tale motif of the "demon lover," as found in, for example, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," "Beauty and the Beast," or Goblin Men. The union of such supernatural beings and humans, she says, "suggest[s] the possibility of transcendence, the mystical translation from one sphere into another that can result in ecstasy and the suspension of reality" (200). This backdrop explains the strange demon lover-like sexual hold Quilp seems to have over his wife. Quilp possesses both the repulsion-attraction and the "childishness" of such figures (206). However, she also argues, Quilp is in a realistic novel and so does not suggest the otherworldly transcendence of fairy-tale demon lovers; instead, he reminds us of "a sordid reality of the real world—that there is pleasure to be had from making others suffer and from delighting in their pain" (208). Miss Mowcher, as procuress, is avariciously mercenary rather than sexually voracious herself. However, Dickens changed her arc mid-novel, Morgentaler observes, after he received a threat of legal action from a real dwarf, Mrs. Seymour Hill, who had been Catherine's chiropodist, and who recognized herself in Miss Mowcher's first appearance of the December 1849 number of David Copperfield (209). Morgentaler suggests several reasons for Dickens's propensity to "imagine evil as synonymous with being small": "the notion of compensation and equilibrium" (that inner nature and outward physicality would balance each other), "fear of the Other," and "a restatement of the commonplace eighteenth-century belief that a deformed body" signifies "deformed morality" (209).

Disability

Two articles address the portrayal of characters with mental disabilities. "Charles Dickens and Intellectual Disability," by Edward A. Polloway, J. David Smith, and James R. Patton, argues that Dickens was aware of the pervasiveness of stereotypes in his society regarding intellectual disability and sought to oppose them in his portrayals. The authors base their assessment on Dickens's positive response in American Notes to the institutions in Boston that he visited and on his tendency in the fiction to indict societies rather than heredity for the unhappy condition of disabled characters. Smike's disability is rooted in "the toxic environment of the school," for example, and Barnaby Rudge is "duped by others" into his involvement in the Gordon Riots (4). They also argue that, with Mr. Dick, who "serves as a moral counselor in a diversity of roles," Dickens demonstrates the positive and important roles such characters can fulfill (5). They conclude with a discussion of the article "Idiots" published in Household Words in 1853, demonstrating that in this essay Dickens considered people with mental disabilities able to develop socially and cognitively if given the right kinds of opportunity and support.

Gillian Ray-Barruel makes a very similar argument in "Conflicting Models of Care for People with Mental Disabilities in Charles Dickens's Fiction and Journalism," but provides a more detailed account of the context within which to understand Dickens's advocacy for humane treatment. She ponders the fact that in his novels, Dickens upholds the traditional Christian community care model for those less fortunate, portraying the asylum system and its proponents as threats and villains, while in his journalism he published several articles expressing enthusiastic support for those asylums like Earlswood (which he visited in 1853) that were run according to philanthropically reformed principles. Ray-Barruel also bases her analysis on Smike, Barnaby, Mr. Dick, and the "Idiots" article, but presents a more mixed assessment of the progressivism of his advocacy. While he presents his disabled characters in ways that invoke sympathy in middle-class readers, she says, he also portrays the best way to care for them as "paternalistic" (94), the "value" they can supply to their communities as marginal (95), and their chances of falling in love or reproducing as nil (95). Mr. Dick is the lone exception in this analysis. His relationship with Betsey Trotwood is reciprocal rather than paternalistic, and his contributions to the family are valuable both emotionally and economically. In his character, Ray-Barruel claims, we can discern "Dickens's belief that, with support and encouragement, people with mental disabilities could work and become useful contributors to the household economy" (100). She leaves us with the question about why he seems to have changed his mind about asylums, whether because his visits to them were positive or "whether he praised them to please his Lunacy Commission colleagues" (103).

Jennifer Janachek's "'This curious association of objects': Dickens's Treatment of Chair-Transported Characters in Dombey and Son and Bleak House" focuses on two chair-bound characters, Mrs. Skewton of Dombey and Son and Grandfather Smallweed of Bleak House. She argues that Dickens's "harsh treatment" of both characters exposes "not a hatred of the lame," but the anxiety that the convenience of chair transport encourages people "to take advantage of others, thus causing moral as well as physical stagnation" (149). She grounds this analysis on a history of attitudes towards sedan chairs and wheelchairs, which were in Dickens's time, she explains, "largely associated in the public opinion with self-indulgence" (150). Thus, Mrs. Skewton uses one as a "display of the wealth and status that she, in actuality, lacks" with the result that both she and her page, Withers, are "objectified by … association with this method of mobility" (153, 150). Her years spent in the chair have "conditioned her to be an object" (155), as shown by the stroke that in the end paralyzes her. At the same time, Withers comes to be defined as the objectified laborer "behind the technology" (150). If Mrs. Skewton presents a "blurry boundary between need and pretense" (154), Grandfather Smallweed does in fact need his chair. However, the contrast drawn between him and the lame but mobile Phil Squod makes clear that Smallweed's economic and physical uses of other people connect him, like Mrs. Skewton, to the anxiety about the morally stagnating effects of chair transport, effects which get passed on to future generations since the Smallweeds "seem to successively lose more verve" (159). Janachek turns briefly to mass chair transport by the railroad at the end of her article. The railroad, too, turns the labor behind the travel invisible, and the traveler "suspends his or her agency while that of the machine takes over," one way in which Dickens associates trains with death (161).

Bodies as Things

Janachek looks at railroad travel only briefly in her article, but Charlotte Mathiesen makes it the central focus of "'A Perambulating Mass of Woollen Goods': Travelling Bodies in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Railroad Journey." Mathiesen discusses the many anxieties this form of travel caused for Victorians, as expressed by Dickens and several other mid-Victorian writers. Dickens's account of Staggs's Gardens in Dombey and Son, for example, illustrates the anxiety that the railroad is making the environment over in its own image. In Dickens's description, "[t]he repetitive listing of 'railway' items is indicative of the homogeneity of capitalist production" (45). As with locales, so with people: if the trains are not destroying bodies via accidents (as with Carker), they remake travelers into "mere parcels"—wrapped, padded, and cut off from contact with the places through which they travel (49). The very wrappings and domestic accoutrements of railway cars that are designed to alleviate anxiety about the effects of travel, which run from illness and weariness to undesirable social contact, instead cause another anxiety: that the body itself "is no longer a 'living member', only a commodified railway item" (54).

Mathieson unpacks these ideas in more detail, and adds consideration of other forms of mobility and other spaces, in her monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation. In the introduction, she supplies a detailed look at new technologies of transport that served to create what she calls "the nation-place," the nation as a socio-physical space newly connected by networks of transportation systems. Intranational networks, her argument goes, influence the formation of national identity, just as new international ones helped form the nation as a place in the global world. She undergirds this analysis with "mobility theory," an idea based on Henri Lefebvre's notion of social space—that space itself is produced through "social relations which are also effected [sic] by the space in which they take place" (14). Furthermore, "insofar as mobility is social, the classed, gendered and racial statuses of individual bodies inflect upon how their movements are both performed and interpreted in different special settings [sic]" (14).

In chapter 1, Mathieson considers "the social meanings of walking" (23), a form of mobility that comes to represent the condition of being "off the network" and outside the modern community. Thus, "the walking body and its production of the nation-place [is] wrought with the contradictions of (dis)connection" (23). In the walking journey of Nell and her grandfather that structures The Old Curiosity Shop, Dickens uses this off-network condition to represent the community of the nation anew, through the lens of a class status that produces positive forms of connection that more modern networks of mobility preclude—even though the journey itself is taken as means of escaping from the community.

In chapter 2, Mathieson elaborates a close reading of the railway passages in Dombey and Son (Mr. Dombey's rail journey to Leamington after Paul's death and Carker's death-by-train) in order to highlight the anxieties regarding the body in relation to modernity that they reveal. She notes, for example, that Mr. Dombey's journey articulates anxieties caused by the traveling body's newly alienated position vis-à-vis the "panoramic" landscape that floods past the compartment window and the resulting senses of loss and unreal illusion that this new way of seeing the landscape produces (69). The fragmentation of Carker's body by the train that kills him expresses, too, anxieties about the way the body "fares in the encounters with modernity" (72).

Chapter 3 includes discussion of the ways Little Dorrit opens up questions about "the nature of national identity and the possibilities of cosmopolitanism" (105). On one hand, Mathieson reminds us, the narrative turns a critical eye on English society abroad as exemplified by Mr. Meagle (for whom other languages besides his own are "all bosh!") and the Dorrits' tour-guide Mrs. General, whose "Prunes and Prism" "varnishing" of her charges creates a "boundary" between them and the foreign worlds through which they travel and attempts to seal them into a "rigid" national identity (111, 112). On the other hand, Mathieson demonstrates ways in which the novel also presents the Continent itself as a "hostile" and "resolutely unstable" space against which London is initially presented as closed (108, 113). As the Dorrits make their Continental tour, however, the distance between home and continental locales seems to collapse, one consequence of the rapidity of modem travel. Amy experiences difficulty comprehending "space-time simultaneity" and expects to come upon the Marshalsea around every corner, while Mr. Dorrit sinks into the delusion that he is still there (115). These seeming collapses of distance become literal collapses (of Merdle's bank, of Mrs. Clennam's house) that indicate a "sense of dissolution" that leads Mathieson to claim, "Borders, the novel finally suggests, are ineffectual" (117, 118). She reads a hopeful message about the possibilities of the new interconnectedness between Britain and Europe in the novel's final moment: "ultimately the hope of the novel and the nation lies in surpassing the close, bounded spaces of London, with the final, hopeful movement of Clennam and Amy Dorrit into the bustling, unsettled space of modernity" (118).

In chapter 4, Mathieson takes us not just across the Channel but across the globe in a discussion of the ways in David Copperfield that far-distant colonies are rendered "'merely imaginary'"—"not as realized spaces in and of themselves" but depicted "as necessary to British concerns through trade and opportunity" (130–31, quoting Micawber). As with Little Dorrit, the seeming collapse of distances contributes to this effect, especially since in Copperfield there is little narrative space devoted to either the Micawber's voyage to Australia or Jack Malden's journey to India. However, Mathieson notes that the latter journey is paralleled by David's trip to Yarmouth (he takes this excursion while Jack is away). If global space contracts in the other journeys, in this one the national space seems to expand, both in the dialogue with which the characters discuss it and in the narrative space it takes up in the novel. However, this dialogue and narration recall the language used in travel narratives of imperial spaces. Thus, the national and global spaces are intimately connected, and "the global journey is … not straightforwardly relegated to the peripheries of the nation and the narration: its codified absence reverberates within the nation-space" (133). David Copperfield, she concludes, offers "brief yet indicative glimpses into the uncertainties of space" (133).

Two studies examine parts of bodies seemingly made into things. Neil Forsyth's "Hands in Dickens: Neuroscience and Interpretation" approaches this subject via neuroscientific research into "mirror neurons" in order to explain why the details of characterization that Dickens uses remain so vivid. Because our neuronal activity imitates actions and sensations of the bodies described in the narrative in a phenomenon called "simulation," he claims, our brains experience the sensations that are described there (212). Because of this "mirroring," readers recognize the connection between Molly and Estella in Great Expectations in the similar actions of their hands, for example, even though Pip is unable to perceive it. The same technique applies with Jaggers, whose hand gestures cause the reader to recognize him before Pip does. Forsyth then generalizes to the hand-language Dickens uses throughout his novels—"Fagin's dirty fingernails, the lily hands of Charity and Mercy Pecksniff, Captain Cutler's remarkable hook, Stephen Blackpool's steady grasp, Thomas Gradgrind's 'squarely pointing square forefinger', … the fat forefinger of Inspector Bucket," and Uriah Heep's handshakes, the latter of which express nonverbally a range of social interactions whose significance a reader feels without express narration (216). Understanding these experiences, Forsyth concludes, "seems a helpful way to describe what works of art do to us" (219).

Peter J. Capuano approaches "hands" from a different set of perspectives in Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. He claims that hands become "newly relevant" in the nineteenth century because they are newly "dislocated, destabilized, or rendered otherwise changed" by mechanization in industry and new information in natural science (including a new awareness of anthropoid apes) (1, 2). These developments cause new anxiety regarding human dignity which had until then been signified in important ways by the human hand. This anxiety caused a "spike" in references to and representations of hands in nineteenth-century discourse, particularly in novels, Capuano maintains, a claim he supports with macro-data produced by "computer-assisted analysis of thousands of nineteenth-century novels" and an image of the computer-produced word cloud showing the word "hands" in much the largest font at its center (12). His data show that "hands" appear in nineteenth-century novels "more often than any other body part including faces, heads, and eyes" (12). Why has this phenomenon not been noticed before? His answer lies in "the logic of late capitalism," which he says "treats its hands so metaphorically" that the "centrality of an embodied handedness to Victorian life" has become invisible to us (3). To take a new look at hands in their concrete literality, or as he puts it, to look "carefully at rather than through appearances" will, he states, yield novel readings of the canonical texts he treats in his chapters (11, Capuano's emphasis). His readings set those texts in complicated and interesting relation to "different literal lines of manual interpretation," including "manufacture in Frankenstein and factory fiction; needlework and manipulation in Shirley and Vanity Fair, respectively; racialized hands in Great Expectations and Daniel Deronda; penmanship and the narrative dynamics of identity in Bleak House, Lady Audley's Secret, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (14).

The chapter on Great Expectations reads that novel's fascination with hands through the "Victorian penchant for reading the legibility of character in the materiality of the body," which Capuano presents in an account of Richard Beamish's Psychonomy of the Hand (1843) and The Hand Phrenologically Considered (1848), which did for hands what head phrenology did for heads (127). Capuano supplies several images from these texts that purported to show a natural hierarchy from gorilla hands at the bottom through laboring hands to genteel hands, thus naturalizing the class and race hierarchies of the day. When he turns to Great Expectations, then, he demonstrates that Jaggers, for example, is anxious to conceal working-class origins of his own, and that his delight in "taming" Molly (whom Capuano characterizes as an Irish other) through her hands allows him "to touch and yet control the qualities that middle-class Victorian men were most anxious about: their proximity to manual labor, 'unmanly' intellectual labor, and racial degeneration" (142). (The secret marriage of the gentleman Arthur Munby to the working class Hannah Cullwick supplies another example.) Like Forsyth, Capuano also demonstrates the hand-connectedness between Molly and Estella in order to emphasize the "Darwinian truth" Dickens elaborates: "that criminality and civilization, violence and refinement, wealth and poverty are inextricably linked" (146). What Pip must learn is the ability "to distinguish between criminality and manual labor, between hands that forge bank notes and hands that forge iron, and ultimately between hands that 'work' and hands that work" (151).

For his chapter on Bleak House, Capuano plunges us into the history of penmanship and handwriting analysis, demonstrating first that for all its production of epistolary novels, the eighteenth century paid no attention to what individual handwriting looked like. By contrast, the crucial matter upon which the plot of Bleak House turns is the recognizability of individual written hands—those of Nemo and of Lady Dedlock. As hand phrenology displaced head phrenology, so handwriting analysis displaced physiognomy as part of the more general shift in interest from the eye in the eighteenth century to the hand in the nineteenth. In this chapter, we learn about various modes of teaching writing, including images of some of the technologies like the "tantalograph" that supposedly aided learners in making their scripts more perfect—all of which demonstrate, alongside the mechanization of other kinds of labor, the "effects of mechanization on the human body" (197). "There may be no work of fiction in the nineteenth century that so adamantly dramatizes the tensions between mechanized and individualized modes of writing as … Bleak House," Capuano claims as he turns to this novel (196). He demonstrates that the novel, written in an "atmosphere … saturated with mechanized culture" is "propel[led]" by "the uniqueness of an individual character's handwriting" (205, 204), and so serves as an example of "broader cultural anxieties about authenticity in a world becoming increasingly dependent on automatic manufacture" (207). This last chapter, then, reveals that in this time when the preeminence of the hand as sign of the human became threatened, the plots of novels like Bleak House and the detective fiction genre so often turn on the individuality of that hand's product.

Corpses

A body cannot become more a "thing" than it does in death, however, and 2015 saw two monographs on the subject of Victorian death culture, Deborah Lutz's Relics of Death and Claire Wood's Dickens and the Business of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Both books base their methodologies on "Thing Theory" in combination with other modes of analysis, Arjun Appadurai's analysis of commodities in Wood's case, Benjaminian "aura" in Lutz's. The two books constitute a complementary pair, in fact, with Wood's focus on the public and commercial dimension of the death culture (and Dickens's ambivalence about it) and Lutz's focus on private practices of mourning (and Dickens's participation in them).

"'Thing theory' should always start here," Lutz claims boldly of the saints' relics that are the forebears to the secular relics that were so important to grieving Victorians. "No other objects are, arguably, so infused with the special 'thingness' the material culturalist studies: with ideas, with interiority, with the metaphysical" (5). Thus, she embarks on a fascinating study of Victorian "relic love," the "intimate act" of an individual "communing with a dead loved one" (11). The death culture of this period was made up of some curious bedfellows, as it turns out, taking the idealization of "individualism and sentimentalism" from Romanticism, the idea of the "good death" from Evangelicalism, the idea that spirits linger among the living in some sort of material presence from Spiritualism, and the idea that "our objecthood defined our selfhood at all stages of existence" taken from agnosticism and atheism (2). Relics, she explains, act as "repositories" both for stories and for "lyrical memories" and so require unpacking (2). In this unpacking, she contends, they provide a sort of re-animation of the dead loved one for the bereaved.

There are two orders of relics. "Primary relics" are the thing itself, organic parts of the body such as hair or skin—and Lutz supplies a fascinating discussion of the many ways besides lockets of hair that Victorians preserved parts of their loved ones' corpses as relics (including books bound in skin, for example). "Secondary" or "contact relics" are things that had been in contact with the body and so might be imbued with fluids (tears, sweat, oil, blood) such as letters, drinking vessels, writing utensils, clothing. Lutz's aim is to read literary works "as a means to understand the relic culture they elucidate, just as relics are 'read' to theorize their begetting of signs, tales, and lyricism" (3). She also supplies a history of this culture that, she explains, burgeoned even to decadence in the nineteenth century (while, paradoxically, mechanical modes of reproduction and preservation of memories such as the photograph were becoming common) and then disappeared after the Great War as death became a "medical problem, to be dealt with by science and hospitals" and "fear of death became so overwhelming that death was something to be denied and the dead body … an object of loathing" (5). This history illuminates why we find such "relic-love" ghoulish now, whereas the Victorians found it comforting and normal. Indeed, the great revelation of this book to me was its imaginative leap into understanding a topic that is nearly taboo in our own culture: Lutz reveals that death was an intimate part of life for Victorians—not ghastly and Other, as it is for us.

In her chapter on Dickens's Great Expectations, she argues that Pip needs to learn to "incorporate endings into his being" so that he can move flexibly "through many selves" (101). This lesson appears in the many "[l]ittle memorials" that are "seeded throughout the novel" whereby "the elegiac tends … toward the effigic" (80). As Lutz says, "Dickens's novels probe the porousness of the life/ death boundary and the way that animation could move smoothly, both ways, along a continuum: from vitality into matter, and from dead matter into a kind of liveliness" (80). Exemplary characters like Wemmick can "be supple among many selves," while Miss Havisham presents the danger of "ossification" in "bitterness" (101). Pip, Lutz explains, has difficulty "coinciding with himself, which in turn leads to a measure of self-haunting" (80). He is full of regret over his "lack of mastery of his own story" and "shame over his powerlessness" (80). After an intriguing explication of the positive meanings the Victorians—including Dickens—could attach to corpses (and thus "endings"), including their power to re-animate in memory, in the afterlife, in narrative, and in incorporation into the identity of the bereaved, she demonstrates the ways the novel teaches Pip (and through him its readers) how to "participate in the danse macabre that is being" and so to be "dead without ossification, bitterness" (91, 101).

With Claire Wood, we turn to the body not as sacrosanct relic, but as commodity. She examines the many means "whereby death becomes an occasion for profit" following the 1832 Anatomy Act, including the production and sale of coffins and clothing, the formation of joint-stock cemetery companies, and the creation of insurance policies that "grant the body a certain financial value, only released at death" (3). Wood takes the notion of the commodity beyond Marx's use value, however, adding to it the notion of the fetish from anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses, following Arjun Appadurai's introduction to The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (1986). In this expanded understanding, commodities are objects that have magical properties or protect against absence; thus, death objects can shift or "simultaneously bear commercial and affective values" (7).

In her first chapter, Wood explores Dickens's ambivalence towards the business of death in his journalism and fiction, especially in Martin Chuzzlewit. Although he certainly "loathed the commercialised funeral spectacle," Wood explains, the "exuberance of [his] descriptions" and the frequency of his attention to it indicate that an "attraction underpinned his antipathy" (12). Wood looks at his handling of public and private funerals and of death professionals, finding that while he objected to the loss of dignity suffered by both deceased and bereaved in the commodification process, which seemed to him a "tawdry performance" intended to demonstrate publically the "wealth and status of the deceased" rather than to afford respect (18), he also appreciated the "carnivalesque appeal of making the corpse financially generative, which connects death with renewal" (25). As Wood paraphrases Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World (1984), death is "the condition of life's constant … rejuvenation," and so Dickens's fictional death-workers like Mrs. Gamp and Jerry Cruncher are therefore ambivalent figures rather than the outright villains delineated in the journalism (25). With Chuzzlewit, Wood also explores the "commodified and self-commodifying culture" of death professionals, especially through the "glass," the "medium through which the commodifying gaze is focused" (27). She takes us through a series of spaces in which the body is put on display for these twin purposes, from shop windows to waxworks, and from scaffold to morgue and cemetery. An extended reading of A Tale of Two Cities closes this chapter, in which she concludes that Carton's death gains him dignity despite its potentially spectacular display on tumbril and scaffold and the potentially fragmenting commodification of his body by mechanized guillotine because of the interior monologue, which restores to him a Victorian "good death" with its "mental clarity and reflection" and the "projection of a narrative afterlife" (57).

In her second chapter, Wood analyzes The Old Curiosity Shop and Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions, finding that while Dickens seems "troubled and fascinated" in Shop by the commercialization of death (89), including the profitability of the "death-based fiction" of the novel itself (60), Marigold reveals a "mature Dickens" who has come to understand that "the commodification of death does not reduce it solely to monetary value," that "the pathos, anger or comedy generated by commercialised death scenes … can powerfully move the reader to thought and action" (90, 105). In Old Curiosity Shop, Wood demonstrates, scenes in which death can produce "transcendent values," such as a "renewed sense of community and a moral wisdom that leads to positive action," alternate persistently with scenes in which death is reduced to an opportunity for profit for those who make a living from it, and "so neither [view] can be rejected" (90). By the time of Dr. Marigold, however, the text "present[s] a fluid interchange of body, corpse, text, and commodity" and "readily accept[s] that death has a financial value" without anxiety (90). The "commercial lens is part of the text's comedy" while human relationships remain irreducible to financial terms (98).

In her third chapter, Wood turns to Dickens's analysis of death and property in Bleak House in order to uncover what the novel presents as "the inherent deathliness of material property" (106). "Bleak House insistently reminds us that London is a necropolis," she asserts, before demonstrating the many ways the novel "destabilises the property designations of tomb and home" (118). Tom-All-Alone's, for example, is itself portrayed as a corpse, just as the slang term for uninhabited property or spaces that house the dead was "dead property" (107). Other "corpselike houses and lodgings" also "force the living and the dead into physical and figurative cohabitations" (107). She examines the presentation of objects preserving the dead, which "colonise domestic space"—portraits and taxidermy, for example (107). Chesney Wold, she concludes, "collapses the distinction between home and tomb … making a house with 'no stir of life about it' continuous with the mausoleum located in the estate's park," whereas the second Bleak House "gently accommodates aspects of both temporal and spiritual worlds," thus providing a potentially redemptive meaning for death as a commodity form (129, 130).

Wood's reading of Our Mutual Friend in her fourth chapter springs from Catherine Gallagher's analysis of that novel's "bioeconomics," which "place[s] the human body at the centre of the economic system" (133). However, Wood sees a Dickens who has accepted "death commodification," as in Dr. Marigold, and "tempers" it in an "exploration of losing things and getting them back, or having things and giving them up" (133). In these "rehearsals of loss" the things lost, regained, or given up "assume other values in addition to monetary ones" (133). She sees this process, for example, in Betty Higden's death and burial at the paper mill, an event which helps to regenerate relations among the main characters. This regeneration is signified, she argues, by the manufacturing of paper, a reading supported by Dickens's article "A Paper Mill," which treats paper-making as a "key revivifying commodit[y]" (134).

In her conclusion, Wood turns to Dickens's own "post-mortem commodification and the 'theft' of his body, name and image" (157), looking at three moments in which the tensions she has been examining in the study seem to have become acute: the circumstances of his death and burial, a result of "complex negotiations between the wishes of the dead and the demands of the living" (158); the 1873 continuation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Thomas James, who claimed that the author's ghost dictated to him; and the collection of mystery stories edited by Anne Perry, Death by Dickens (2004), in which the author becomes a character "with no life of his own" instead of "an authoritative creator" (166). In contrast to these examples of the commodification of Dickens and his works, she decides that the "spirit of heartfelt celebration, rather than mercenary profiteering" animated the Dickens 2012 ceremonies, allowing the author "to emerge … as a relevant and curiously vital figure, rather than the Dickens-character of more sterile appropriations" (166).

Childhood, Adulthood, Family

As Malcolm Andrews states in his preface to Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters's collection Dickens and the Imagined Child, the child Dickens persisted into the adult author not only with the influences of childhood imagination, of stories loved in childhood, and even of the Medway towns in the later fiction, but also in the author's ability to "[educate] us backward" and "to make us know what it feels like to be a child" (xiv). In their introduction to this collection, Merchant and Waters remind us of the great "range of keynotes sounded" by Dickens's representations of childhood—sentimental, humorous, blackly painful—adding that some of this response "owes much to the diversity of opinion circulating about the topic in his own day" (4, 5). However, Dickens's singular achievement, they maintain, was to combine "the act of imagination that sees the environment of the child as if through the child's eyes with the act of analysis that drills down into his mind and motives," and thus to convey to readers both knowledge about the characters that the latter cannot know themselves and "the knowledge that lives inside them" (5, Merchant and Waters's emphasis). In this way, they claim, "Dickens has completed in fiction the evolution for which, in the field of education theory, Rousseau's Emile had called a hundred years before" (6). This volume of essays, then, takes as its central topic of exporation what a child was for Dickens. It is divided into three parts: "The Dickensian Child" (explored as both "characteristic type and particular example" [7]), "Childhood and Memory," and "Children, Reading and Writing."

Rosemarie Bodenheimer's chapter "Dickens and the Knowing Child" argues that the characteristic Dickensian child "collaps[es] temporal distinctions between … childhood and adulthood" (16), partly because it is "impossibly aged"—either crushed like Smike or Barnaby Rudge or prematurely old like Paul Dombey or Jenny Wren (15)—and partly because Dickens shows their childhoods and (of those who survive) their adulthoods, but not their adolescences. Why, Bodenheimer asks, "are their child-like appearances insisted on when they are functioning most ably as adults?" (16) Her answer is that, because of their observational power, they "know things they think they should not know" (16). This knowledge threatens the adult interlocutors, who will "banish or kill [the child] to protect themselves from what it knows" (17). This double aged-ness suggests externally the psychological condition of having to behave like a child while not feeling like one. These canny uncanny children, Bodenheimer explains, do not grow up but rather "move on," picaro-like, bringing their observational powers into new scenes (13). She ends with a reading of Bleak House's Jo, "a powerful but incoherent creation" (21), she claims, because he is both a "very human boy" and a "bestial degenerate savage" (24). In him, the "horror of Ignorance [from Carol] … has somehow produced a rather sophisticated form of self-knowledge," and so he seems to flicker between "specimen on display" and "spokesperson for his own values and ideas" (24).

Galia Benziman's chapter "Who Stole the Child? Missing Babies and Blank Identities in Early Dickens" argues that Dickens's tendency to favor "melodramatic plot devices and fairy-tale solutions" over direct social critique in Oliver Twist and "The First of May" is in fact a strength and not the work of a "less politically sophisticated" author, as some critics have claimed about his early career (27). The latter story (from Sketches by Boz) features a chimney sweep who has been stolen as a baby from his noble family and is recognized by the mother when he goes to work in her house. These stories rework the "Family Romance" fantasy, and Benziman claims that the device by which the reworking occurs is the moment of recognition, when the children in both stories see portraits of their mothers and recognize the faces. In Oliver Twist, the maternal attention in the portrait's seeming to look back at Oliver serves as the fantastic device that returns him to his proper position. In "The First of May," the mother herself also recognizes her boy. The recognizing gaze sees the child as a human being and so counteracts the hostile gazes that strip him of individual identity; thus, the texts portray the child as "a shifting moral, legal and psychological signifier" that can be given "social meaning … by the gazes of others" (37). When Oliver is indentured, the magistrate recognizes his terror, a scene that, Benziman argues, "demonstrates how the recognizing gaze … is fused into the social vision of the novel" (39): the "ethical imperative" that every child must be "looked at and recognized as an equally valuable and individuated human being" (40).

Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton's chapter "'No magic dwelling-place in magic story'" also analyzes the uses Dickens makes of fairy tales and other cultural myths, including Christian iconography. She argues, however, that the seemingly irreconcilable "romantic" and "commercial" views of the child in Dombey and Son operate through the same motifs, including "the changeling, the witch and the enchanted princess" (44). Since the condition of the children is in large part determined by the fantasies of the adults, she finds that this use of mythological narratives or fairy-tale fantasies contrasts with Dickens's "customary loyalty to fairy tale as a transformative gift of the imagination" (49). By novel's end, she contends, the fairy tale and commercial motifs are reconciled: "No longer 'base coin', Florence becomes literally productive" in the births of the new Florence and Paul (55).

Jennifer Gribble's chapter "'In a State of Bondage': The Children of Bleak House" examines the influence of the 39 Articles and "the Parousia model" (living in expectation and preparation for the coming of the kingdom of God) on Dickens's thinking about "neglected and put-upon children" (58, 65). This lens, she says, both clarifies his take on the biblical narrative of the Fall (one that "allows for the redemptive possibilities of free will") and resolves the seeming contradiction between his "sense of the determining effects of the environment" and "his investment in the transformative power of goodness" (58). Gribble argues that Bleak House diagnoses two crimes against children: the evangelical one of Miss Barbary and Chadband and the collective or social one of Chancery. Both crimes "visit the sins of the fathers upon the … children" (59). John Jarndyce's Bleak House supplies the solution: he and Esther run this household according to the Parousia model, as Charley does that of the Necketts. Both households remain vulnerable to the greater social evils of their milieu, however, and because the Necketts are only rescued by chance, the "randomness and the inevitable limits" of Jarndyce's charitable acts are made clear (69). However, Gribble concludes that even though the novel demonstrates such limits, it affirms the "potentiality of good works and lively faith to ameliorate the sins of the fathers" (71).

Maria Teresa Chialant's "The Adult Narrator's Memory of Childhood in David's, Esther's, and Pip's Autobiographies" offers an explanation for Victorian writers' "assumption … of fictive figures, doubles, and alternative narrators" in the "conflict between narcissism and restraint" which they inherited from the Romantic "deep distrust of subjectivity" (89). She points out that all three fictional autobiographies are shaped around secrets "perceived as 'taints' and 'wounds' by [the] characters," as is Dickens's own autobiographical fragment (79). All four "authors" suffer in secret and escape that suffering by telling stories, acts of writing that become "a way of defining their own identities" (83). The adult narrator chooses to recount from the child's perspective those feelings, thoughts, events, people, and places that contribute to this identity formation. The result, Chialant concludes, is a vision of "Dickens's need to … be able to speak of himself" despite his culture's "distrust … of overemphasizing the centrality of the self" (89).

In her chapter "A Medway Childhood," Jane Avner investigates ways to understand what Dickens meant when he considered the area around his childhood home in Chatham "the birth-place of [his] fancy." What is "the Dickensian notion of 'fancy'" and how do certain of his works (Great Expectations and some essays in Uncommerical Traveler) "map its 'birthplace'" (94)? Her investigation takes her to two other authors, Yves Bonnefoy, whose account in the autobiography L'Arrière-Pays (1972) of the way a place shaped his imaginative life is strikingly similar to Dickens's, and also to Michel Collot, who theorizes in La Pensée-Paysage (2011) that the erect human posture gives us a spatial orientation that intersects with the line of the horizon, and thus we "see the land differently," as landscape (96). Humans are thus "being[s] of distance" [être des lointains], an idea to which Avner adds that we are also "inhabited by a certain nostalgia 'des lointains'," making the "lointains" both spatial and temporal (96). Both kinds of distance give the landscapes that have been lost (in the passage of time and the movements away) an "irresistible attraction" (Collot) and "prestige" (Bonnefoy) (98).

Nostalgia is a peculiar suffering caused by loss; as Avner reminds us via Kant, "the nostalgic … [is] always disappointed because it is never the place of one's youth that one seeks to recover but youth itself" (99). Avner brings these insights back to Pip, whose sense of place is "shot through with a singularly complex form of pain and yearning" and to Great Expectations, itself a "novel of 'return'" for both its protagonist and its author (99). When Avner turns from these meditations on the "birthplace" to the "fancy," she explores the childhood experiences Dickens had in Chatham that seem to have produced "his singularly anarchic sensibility" (100): attending lyings-in with his nurse, going to provincial theatrical performances with all their hilarious oddities, witnessing adult "humbug and hypocrisy" (100). The landscape at the opening of Great Expectations is "Pip's composition," just as the childhood Medway was Dickens's, and Pip remains tied to this landscape (called, as Avner points out, "the meshes" in local pronunciation), and it "renders the very texture and tone of [his] emotional life" and "structure[s] his story" (103, 104).

In "'Ten thousand million delights'" Jonathan Buckmaster takes a Bakhtinian look at Dickens's love of the pantomime and its clown figure. He finds in Dickens's introduction to Joseph Grimaldi's Life (1838) that one of the most attractive features of this form of entertainment was "the clown's grotesque consumption of enchanted foodstuffs," which "intersects with another of Dickens's childhood fascinations, Christmas" (111). Buckmaster traces the origins of this pantomime figure in folk culture and reminds us that his inordinate eating and drinking are an important manifestation of what Bakhtin calls the "grotesque body" in Rabelais and His World (1968). The pantomime clown with this trait finds its way into the Dickensian clown with that figure's grotesqueries as well: Mr. Grimwig's "I'll eat my own head" in Oliver Twist, Quilp's excesses in The Old Curiosity Shop, and Bob Sawyer's indulgence of appetites "in dangerous locations" (on top of a stage-coach)—the latter illustrated by Phiz in a posture that resembles a popular print of Grimaldi (Buckmaster supplies images; 121–22). Dickensian clowns thus retain a "residue of the festive excess," as does Dickens's idea of Christmas, which Buckmaster calls "ambivalent" because while he invents a "modest family-oriented" holiday, he is nevertheless drawn to childhood memories of the "festive marketplaces that characterise Grimaldi's Christmas entertainments" (123). The contrast in Carol between Fezziwig's ball and the Cratchit family dinner demonstrates this double image.

Peter Merchant traces the perhaps overly powerful influence of David Copperfield on writer Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856–1934; pen name F. Anstey) in his chapter "'A kind of odour of Salem House': David Copperfield and Thomas Anstey Guthrie." A constant admirer and avid reader of Dickens since age ten, Anstey claimed both his life and work to have been influenced by him, and Merchant demonstrates the many ways this seems to have been true. He focuses particularly on Anstey's best known works, Vice Versâ; or, A Lesson to Fathers (1882) and A Long Retrospect (1936), tracing the many ways both works "reprise" Copperfield (132). Of the latter, Merchant states, in fact, that "[i]f Anstey's schooldays can be described as Dickensian, on the grounds that 'Dickensian' primarily denotes what people think might happen in a Dickens novel, then his autobiography qualifies for a term applied instead to a particular narrative manner, or particular way of organizing experience: that is, 'Copperfieldian'" (145).

In her chapter "Savage Stories: Charles Dickens, 'The Noble Savage' and the Childhood Imagination," Laura Peters seeks in Dickens's childhood reading the origins of the racial attitudes expressed so notoriously in his 1853 Household Words essay "The Noble Savage." This reading, Peters argues, formed and fed what she calls, using a phrase from Octave Mannoni's Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1956; 1964), his "colonial complex." This complex includes the "exotic of childhood" that is formed in "childhood virtual experiences such as are obtained through reading" and in the replication of the father's domination of the child in its own "dominating desire in relation to others" (162). Peters also argues that Dickens privileged his childhood memories because he considered childhood to be a "state of innocence and spirituality" with foundational importance to adult imagination and artistic creativity, a conception inherited from Wordsworth and the Romantics (152). The stasis (or what we might call "arrested development") that underlies this attitude gets projected onto the colonial other. Peters explains that "Dickens's lifelong celebration of the individual memory of childhood stories actually contains a profound set of contradictions while being premised on a notion of the world and its peoples which feeds his repressed colonial complex" (165).

In the chapter "Child Readers in Dickens's Novels," Wu Di examines not Dickens's own childhood reading, but his representations of child readers in Dombey and Son, Hard Times, and David Copperfield. She premises her analysis on reading theorist Louise Rosenblatt's identification of two kinds of reading, "efferent" (in which the reader is "focused on the acquisition of information") and "aesthetic" (in which the reader's "unique experience of engagement is primary") (168). Di confirms that Dickens valued the latter—even to the point of skewering a too singular focus on the former in the "Facts" school of Hard Times—in her discussion of the way Dickens represents the positive reading experiences of his child characters as "an immersion in an imaginative or dream world" that "accommodates both belief and desire, both representationalism and escapism" (169). Paul Dombey and Louisa Gradgrind, she demonstrates, suffer "narrowed" lives because of childhood reading that has been "damagingly constrained by the law of the father" (179, 178), while David Copperfield is "liberated from his imprisonment" (174), "develops confidence in his intellectual powers" (173), and trains to be a writer ("a reader of life" [177]) because his reading has been unconstrained. There is "a 'Dickens Country' of the mind," Di concludes, that "the young 'aesthetic' reader" can enter and from which he or she can learn "sympathetic responsiveness"—and from which readers discover "the most appropriate means of approaching the text" (181).

The final chapter of this collection, Christine Alexander's "Playful 'Assumption': Dickens's Early Performative Creativity and Its Influence on His Sons' Family Newspaper, the Gad's Hill Gazette," turns to Dickens's own children (particularly Henry), as conductors of the family newspaper. Alexander sets this activity into the context of Dickens's love for the theater and his energetically melodramatic style of parenting. The newspaper, it appears, grew out of an imaginative game whereby the children "played at appropriating … the trappings and hierarchy of their father's London office" (195). The newspaper became quite professional, as Alexander demonstrates with images of a few front pages. It holds interest for scholars, she says, as "an index to the family's culture" and "a valuable source of biographical material on Dickens himself" (201, 202).

In her article "Reading Victorian Rags: Recycling, Redemption, and Dickens's Ragged Children," Deborah Wynne makes the argument that Dickens sees a metaphor in "rags recycling" for "society's duties towards destitute children" (35). She begins her explication with a detailed exploration of the Victorian practices of cloth recycling for paper manufacture, an industry that was central to economic growth because it employed so many and provided "the basic material on which the culture wrote and disseminated itself" (36). High demand for paper in the 1850s caused an acute rag shortage, and cloth recycling became "a socially responsible activity," conferring upon rags the paradoxical status of "a despised and ubiquitous, yet valuable and scarce, commodity" (35, 37). Ragged children were likewise increasingly perceived as proper objects of sentimental humanitarian response because they were understood not to be responsible for their condition. Dickens's own such response turned on the similarities he draws between "recycling and social redemption: if filthy tatters could be [transformed] into clean paper, so too could dirty ragged children be transformed by education into liberal subjects and useful citizens" (41). Wynne traces this idea in his letters to Burdett-Coutts in support of funding Ragged Schools, the Household Words article "A Paper-Mill," and his portrayals of rag-beclothed Oliver Twist, Florence Dombey, and David Copperfield, whose rags are "described in the context of rags recycling, with its associations with purification and material transformation" (43). All these cases warn against reading the children's ragged clothing as "a permanent social mark of degradation" (43). Jo's rags, however, are not represented through this discourse. Instead, the "liquefaction of Jo and his rags results in the dark stain of ink that is text," as Dickens "takes his ragged child/rags recycling analogy to its logical conclusion": Jo becomes a "social text that … stir[s] the nation's conscience" (46).

As so many of these studies show, it seems difficult to discuss the child figure without reference to adults, an observation that brings me to Rebecca Rainof's The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity. Rainof seeks to develop a better understanding of the often misunderstood "novels of adulthood" whose mature protagonists develop through seeming stasis (or as she prefers to call it, "inward action") and whose plots seem uneventful. Her study provides a much-needed counterweight, she remarks, to what has been a history of too-exclusive critical attention to the bildungsroman. Rainof claims that the "novel of adulthood" is a distinct form with different traits, including the "paradoxical development within stasis" of the protagonist, "gradualist plots of maturity," and "a process of disillusionment born of adulthood" (6). Rainof considers especially the "relationship between interiority and plot," asking whether "action 'brought inside' [must] really become 'imponderable' in terms of plot" (9, quoting Robert Caserio's Plot, Story, and the Novel: From Dickens and Poe to the Modern Period [1979]). "Are scenes of inward growth active or passive? Do they represent a cessation of plot or its most urgent turning points?" (9) In most criticism, she points out, such "lulls" have been "absorbed into … aspects of narrative that fall under Gérard Genette's heading of 'discourse', loosely defined as everything counterposed to 'story' in a novel" (10). However, she contends instead that a "gradual form of narrative progression is often rigorously at work," cleverly naming these moments "turning stretches" (as opposed to "turning points") (10). She finds "a correspondence between middle age and 'narrative middles,'" and places this convention in the context of such Victorian models of slow development as Darwinian evolution (14). She finds a preferred model in Victorian theological narratives, however, especially reconsiderations of purgatory. In Newman's Tract 90, purgatory is conceived as a "state of growth" distinct from the static conditions of heaven and hell (16). This conception of the purgatorial provides her with an essential means of explicating purgatorial adult plots that remain "indefinitely in medias res" (18). Some of the techniques authors use to create such plots include "establishing closure while gesturing at its impossibility," "spinning counterfactual 'shadow' stories that absorb the main action from a central storyline," "extending the 'sense of a middle' by concealing the beginning of a given action or event," and "destabilizing the 'moment' as the unit for measuring events" (18). Another important archetype she identifies as vital to these narratives is the myth of descent, such as Jonah's sojourn in the whale, which functions as the "quest story of adulthood" (21). Such descents "reveal the transformations that result from an immersion in the past" and signal "mature renovation through preservation" (21).

In her chapter on the bachelor, Rainof argues that in Little Dorrit Dickens combines Victorian ideas about purgatorial development with the doppelgänger tradition as adapted in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow." These two shadowy sources, the purgatorial shade and the shadow self, supply means of placing "the aging bachelor's delayed beginnings and arrested development" and "combination of inaction and desire" into the center of a long narrative (118–19). The two traditions provide "two modes of storytelling" (122). The first, "the hellish stasis of the folkloric model," can be seen in both Amy Dorrit's bedtime story about the tiny woman and her treasured shadow of "some one" and Arthur Clennam's parallel counterfactual "Nobody" narratives (122). In this model, the double or shadow, Rainof explains, becomes the hero of adventurous romances that the more sedentary man desires but in which he does not engage. Dickens adapts this mode of storytelling by reversing the center of attention: he relegates the adventures of "Nobody" to the sidelines and keeps the focus on the aging bachelor. With this adaptation, Rainof demonstrates, Dickens "preserv[es] an uneventful central storyline while still giving the novel a fresh infusion of desire," thus enabling "a new level of extreme gradualism in plotting" (120). The purgatorial mode of storytelling allows a "redemption" of the central character "born not of trial by fire but of a much less pronounced trial by monotony" in "turning stretches" whose action is interior and gradual, as is Clennam's imprisonment in the Marshalsea (122). Rainof finishes this chapter with an analysis of the ways Henry James adapts both these Dickensian strategies in his own bachelor tales (she focuses on The Ambassadors), which "uniquely [succeed] in pushing the novel of maturity even further as the genre that defiantly, and ingeniously, manages to remain in medias res—a midlife 'state of holding on' that prefigures Woolf's subsequent innovations in her works that seek to capture a quality of Victorian retrospection" (155).

Three studies examine family matters. Both Michelle L. Wilson and Shale Preston examine Esther Summerson as a matriarch with an inheritance and an estate, while Angus Easson explicates the important role of domesticity in the shift between Regency and Victorian cultures that he sees in what he calls the "hinge text" of Nicholas Nickleby. Preston's article "Esther Summerson's Estate: The Queer, Quasi-Monarchical Line of Beauty, Family, and Inheritance in Bleak House" is part of the collection Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature, edited by Preston and Duc Dao, a collection whose interest, the editors say in their introduction, is to explore "kinship relations in several of its manifold and subversive permutations in Victorian literature" (3). Preston's is a "resistant" or "disobedient" reading of Esther Summerson's narrative (10, 37). She argues that although Esther has "serviced Jarndyce's patrilineal imperatives," she nevertheless has created her own "authorial estate" that "operates under her own queer terms of primogeniture and love" (37). Esther's narrative is the text she writes and bequeaths to "the first-born son she shares with Ada" (37). Preston supports this reading by attending carefully to the implied tensions between Esther and Jarndyce (she indirectly calls him a Blue Beard, for example) and to her freely expressed "deep instinctive love for his beautiful cousin Ada" (46).

In "Esther Summerson's Narrative Relations: Re-Inscribing Inheritance in Bleak House," Wilson similarly suggests that a new inheritance system is traced in the novel by Esther's narrative and contends that because of it, the novel presents "patrilineal modes of legal inheritance" (represented by Chancery) as unsatisfactory because "they exclude female plots and possibilities" (209). The novel sets up a matrilineal line of descent through Esther's narrative, Wilson contends, which produces the "uncanny, mirror-like relationship between Honoria and Esther" in order to establish the mother's right "to place and name the bastard daughter" (209). Key to this argument is a competition between Esther's version of the story—her language—and that of the other narrator and characters, a competition that Esther must (and does) win through various means: her "writing over" her own "pain with tears of joy" while showing the "strain" of this effort and "talking over" others so that they are forced "to speak the same story" (215, 217). Esther thus inherits the novel by using her "narrative power" to "reinscribe [family ties] … just as the legal narrative attempts to strip [them] away" (220). Specifically, through language, she "binds her mother to herself, creating a familial relationship that the law denies" (223).

Angus Easson's "The Domestic Crummles" explores the ways Nickleby is a "hinge work," responsive to the influences of both residual Regency and emergent Victorian cultural attitudes and practices and thus expressive of the shift between the two worlds (219). In Nicholas, he argues, Dickens presents "a new kind of hero" that expands the notion of "the gentleman" to include artists, authors, and theatrical professionals (221). The "gentlemanliness" of this more inclusive figure rests on such qualities as "innate politeness" and "the dignity of the artist," but also conforms to the Victorian ideal of respectable domestic life (223). Easson takes us through the older Regency ideals with samples from the diary of "undoubted Regency figure" Thomas Raikes (1777–1848), which supply a clear image of the shift in values from an older honor-based, "high-minded" world of noblemen with "polished manners" to the more mercantile Victorian "love of wealth" rather than "love of amusement" (219, 220, quoting Raikes). Easson demonstrates the new demand for respect and dignity for artists with Grimaldi's Life, comparing this artist's demand for "equal terms with the man who invites him to dinner" to Nicholas's claims to be a gentleman despite his obscure origins (223). Other matters, such as the novel's dueling scenes, help demonstrate the way Dickens "shifts between codes as narrative necessity takes him" (226), but Easson's main argument regarding the novel's emergent Victorianism rests on the depiction of the Crummleses and their theatrical company in terms of the respectability that comes from their "triumphant … domesticity" in the "notoriously raffish world of the theatre" (226). Vincent Crummles, Easson concludes, "lies close less to Peregrine Proteus than the great William Macready," who worked to "raise the artistic level of the theatre [and] draw in a middle-class audience, notably by his determination … to clear from London theatres the prostitutes who plied for business there" (227, 228).

Environments

I had set out to call this section "Cities," as Caroline Reitz did in her 2012 survey (DSA), but the appearance of several studies attending to natural elements led me to broaden the name in order to include attention to Dickens's treatments of both human-made and naturally occurring environments. Several studies took topographical angles, ranging from attempts to pinpoint the original real-life models for Dickens's fictional places to ecocritical examinations of works generally understood to be socially focused. I have divided this section into three parts, one surveying studies that attend to the human-made topographies that influence or appear in his works, another surveying those studies that take an interest in ways he uses the natural world, and a third that is best called "psychological" environments.

Urban Environments

Two monographs made extensive and detailed study of Dickens's London—Paul Fyfe's By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis and Mary L. Shannon's Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street. Fyfe is interested in the ways Victorians responded to modern urbanization and the industrial developments that spurred it, taking "accidents" (both the concept and the type of event) as his entrée into this massive topic. "Accident," he finds, provides "an explanatory framework for the paradoxes of urban modernity" because it "holds questions about design and chance in suspense" and so allows for the "productive play" between them, a "play" that the seeming randomness of urban change inspired in the discourses representing metropolitan life from 1830 to 1870 (15, 3). "By tracing representations of accidents," he says, "we can see how Victorians figured the phenomenal, epistemological, and ethical significance of chance alongside concepts of design, agency, and responsibility" (30). Fyfe examines this figuration in scientific, statistical, and even risk management discourses, as well as literature, all of which attempt to manage this conundrum of chance and design as prime movers of modern urbanization and its signature event, the "accident."

In his chapter on Dickens, Fyfe analyzes several pieces in Sketches by Boz as examples of the street sketch, a genre adapted in its techniques and tones to the subject it tackles, the "new everyday" of the metropolis (76). Fyfe attends especially to sketches that report on the new systems of public transport (including vehicles, operators, and management systems) and the frequent accidents they caused. He supplies detailed histories of these systems as they emerged and replaced each other along with public (and Bozian) responses to them, showing the ways each reflects the "paradox of causality" that is the overarching interest of this book (98). He demonstrates that "Sketches by Boz uses [the] overlapping significations of accident to characterize an emerging transport 'system' as well as to unsettle and ironize its own claims to systemic or classificatory understanding" (83). Regarding the Sketches as an "omnibus genre," he remarks, "like the 'omnibus system' which inaugurates Boz's metropolitan scenes and characters, his sketches absorb the accidental into their own systemic properties in several senses," not least of which is "a literary commodity designed for collection in bound form with a unifying title" (98). Fyfe ends his chapter with the intriguing and germane question of whether "to credit Dickens for such an innovative form. Did he design it? Did it happen by accident? The play between 'accident or intention' is the very success of Dickens's project in the Sketches" (99).

If Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) and Julian Wolfreys's Writing London (1998) undergird Fyfe's analysis, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) does so for Mary L. Shannon's Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, which takes a single London street, on or near which were clustered the offices of all the major Victorian journals including Dickens's, as the central node in a network of face-to-face and imagined communities that spread across the empire. Shannon's thesis is that the close face-to-face experiences of editors and writers on this street created "an expectation of, and desire for … a relationship between writer and imagined readers, conducted through print," an expectation and desire that Richard Horne took with him when he emigrated to Australia and worked to reproduce "Wellington Street" on Melbourne's Collins Street (7). Shannon's archival research combines with literary criticism to examine ways that the language of texts bears an important relationship to the physical context in which they are produced. By studying this relationship, we gain a fuller understanding of "the links between fiction, drama, and journalism" and thus a clearer "narrative of the everyday" for these editors, authors, and readers (12).

In her first chapter, Shannon creates a detailed picture of this face-to-face community of editors on Wellington Street with all its kinships, friendships, and marital ties; its memberships in clubs and participation in amateur theatricals; and its close-knit rivalries and tensions. She uses Dickens as a model for what editors must have done routinely—see each other on the street, in each other's homes and offices, at clubs, and at the theater. Dickens "was a focal point for much of the tension," given his conflicts with Jerrold, Thackeray, Forster, and Reynolds (38). Her primary aim, however, is to demonstrate that this face-to-face community created an imaginary community of readers, and that "their war of words produced the very space over which they fought" (45). She illustrates this process with a reading of Dickens's and Reynolds's similar addresses to readers in the inaugural issues of Household Words and Reynolds's Weekly Newspaper.

In chapter 2, Shannon examines Dickens's "popular radicalism" as part of which she delineates the vividness of the contrast between rich and poor in this Wellington Street neighborhood. Chapter 3 makes concrete the connections between print culture and entertainment and spectacle, pointing out the proximity of the Household Words office and the Lyceum ("just across the street" [117]) and then plunging into an account of the borrowings between print and theater media: adaptations of Dickens's works into plays included tableaux vivants based on Phiz's illustrations, which were then reviewed with illustrations of that staging; the "interlinked local networks" of theatrical suppliers, actors, and managers with the print reviewers; and Dickens himself as a showman (125). "Readers and audiences, then, were bound up together in the minds of writers, dramatists, and theater reviewers" (143). In chapter 4, Shannon argues that the "networks of Wellington Street gave life to the print networks on the other side of the globe" (167). The "strong ties of physical proximity" developed on this street were sustained when these networks became transnational (168). Shannon takes as her examples R. H. Horne and Marcus Clarke, who not only replicated Wellington Street on Collins Street in Melbourne but also made self-conscious attempts to connect to the same readership by using the same form (urban sketch writing) and alluding to the shared reference point of Dickens's characters in their own work. In her conclusion, Shannon argues that in Bleak House, a novel of "disconnected people, who, in fact, turn out to be connected," networking is "crucial to survival, happiness, or success" (216, 213). Even though "documents" appear so essential, "it is the successful use of face-to-face connections to extract information which really undermines the anonymity of the city," making secrets impossible in this "tightly interconnected world" (216–17).

Two articles reveal actual London locations for Dickens's fictional spaces as a way into new understanding of the novels they discuss. Ruth Richardson's "The Subterranean Topography of Oliver Twist" sets out to understand why both Dickens and Forster objected so strongly to Phiz's original final illustration for Oliver Twist (the so-called "Fireside" plate) and solicited instead the "Church" plate, now the standard final illustration. She finds an intriguing answer in the work she did to help save from demolition the old Cleveland Street Workhouse, which, she discovered, is located "only a few doors" from Dickens's home as a child in 1815–16 (before the move to Chatham) and again as a young man from 1828 to 1831 (298). This is the Marylebone neighborhood in which his extended family on both sides had lived, and Richardson concludes that therefore Dickens would have had "a good deal of local knowledge" about and "long-term networks of local interaction" with the area (299). Her archival research reveals many local names, for example, that he adapted or used as is in his novels (particularly Oliver Twist and Pickwick Papers), as well as businesses and other concerns that appear in them. But the significance for Oliver Twist comes particularly in the "underground topography" that Richardson describes: the workhouse, it appears, had been connected by tunnel to a medical school. This tunnel supplies concrete confirmation of the traffic in corpses caused by the new Anatomy Act of 1832, which Richardson calls "an advance clause of the New Poor Law" because it "was knowingly designed to enhance the deterrent value of the punitive workhouse" (308). According to this Act, anyone who died "at home or in a workhouse, hospital, or prison (yes, even a debtor's prison)" without the money to pay for a funeral was defined as "'unclaimed' and legally requisitioned for dissection" (308; Richardson's emphasis). Thus, while the Fireside plate delineates only "a conventional happy ending," the Church plate "brings the book full circle to its terrible opening" (310): because in the latter Oliver and Rose are looking only at a memorial plaque of his mother, who has no grave, we are reminded that "Oliver's mother was being dissected while her son was being starved" (310). Even the novel's "happy ending" thus also serves Dickens's critique of the New Poor Law.

Malcolm Andrews takes up the search for the real London graveyard in which Dickens buried his fictional Nemo in Bleak House in "Where Was Nemo Buried?" He begins by following Dickens's own directions in a letter to a Miss Palfry, which lead to the old St. Martin's Burial Ground (now Drury Lane Gardens). This space does not quite fit the description of Nemo's graveyard in the novel, however, and it lies in the wrong parish. Andrews then turns to the sleuthing of an American visitor who toured England in 1879 and published the results of his search in the New York Tribune. These directions lead to the old burial ground at St. Mary-le-Strand in Russell Court, a site that resembles almost exactly the description in Bleak House. Andrews supplies maps and pictures of both sites, along with Phiz's illustrations of Tom-All-Alone's and of Jo showing Lady Dedlock Nemo's grave, all convincing evidence that the Russell Street site must be the place. However, since the duke of Belford (of whose estate it was a part) sold the Russell Court area in 1900, the graveyard with its surrounding houses have all been replaced by Tavistock Street, although there is a plaque on a building that "records the lost burial ground" (255). Noting that in burying Nemo, Dickens had buried "nobody," Andrews recollects another burial of nobody: Scrooge. However, Andrews shows that the illustration of the gravesite shown to Scrooge resembles more closely the St. Martin's site to which Dickens had directed Miss Palfry, even though the textual description uses the motifs that describe Nemo's site: the "iron gate, the burial ground walled in by houses, a graveyard neglected, overgrown and brimming with dead bodies" (256).

In "Narratives of Public Health in Dickens's Journalism: The Trouble with Sanitary Reform," Ralph F. Smith unpacks the attitudes of Dickens and several other Household Words journalists towards the public sanitation reforms of his day in an account of the two major "narratives" or "discourses" regarding public health in London and its surroundings in the wake of the cholera outbreaks that plagued the city. The government embraced the "sanitarian narrative," which was based on the "miasma" theory of disease, and emphasized prevention via sewer and water works projects and Parliamentary enforcement of sanitary practices among the working poor, who were perceived as the cause of outbreaks since they were so often the first victims (158). The medical community embraced the "contagion" or "germ" theory and, though supportive of the sanitarian projects, perceived the poor not as cause but as first victims, with poverty itself a predisposing condition. Smith provides descriptions of many sanitarian-focused articles published in Household Words in 1850–1855, demonstrating the ways the articles "commenced with a sanitarian flavor" but then depart from that narrative either by embracing the contagion narrative, criticizing the government's lackluster efforts, or—especially the case in Dickens's articles—embracing the cause of the poor (159). Smith sorts these articles into three types: the "visitor's story" (in which the author encounters and describes places and people as a kind of flâneur). the "history" (in which the author investigates epidemics from earlier times as commentary on the current day), and the "fanciful tale" (in which the author uses satire, fable, or allegory in order to pillory political efforts or misguided policy regarding sanitation). Dickens, Smith concludes, differs from the other writers in having "the best trained eye for observation" and in considering "'fever' … as much a social diagnosis as it was an outbreak of bodily disease" (178).

Natural Environments

Keith Crook's "Mr. Pickwick and the Mighty Ponds of Hampstead and the River of Wells" also attends to Dickens's ideas about public health; however, his focus is really on water and Mr. Pickwick's sticklebacks. Crook argues against the long history of criticism that claims Pickwick finds its way into cohesion only with the introduction of Sam Weller. Crook finds cohesion right from the beginning with the motif of water that runs throughout the novel. This motif, he contends, gets established immediately with Mr. Pickwick's character as a naturalist researching the sticklebacks that inhabit the ponds and rivers of Hampstead Heath. Crook takes us through a detailed account of the 1830s scientific debates concerning the Fleet River and its sticklebacks to establish the contexts in which Dickens created his character and the researches that launch his adventures. Even the novel's larger plot coheres when looked at from this watery point of view, according to Crook: "Having threatened Mr. Pickwick with dousing under a pump and with drowning in the Medway, and actually ducked him in a pond, Dickens's punning mind, with its love of what is incongruous but sounds oddly right, by a metonymy, drops him back in his element—the Fleet, but this time it is the prison not the river" (103).

Two articles make ecocritical analyses of Dickens's social problem novels, both arguing that the ecological critique supplies an essential element to the social critique. Agnes Kneitz makes this point about Our Mutual Friend in "'As If the River Was Not Meat and Drink to You!' Social Novels as a Means of Framing Nineteenth-Century Environmental Justice." She includes discussion not just of Dickens's novel, but also of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), Wilhelm Raabe's Pfister Mill (1883), and Émile Zola's Germinal (1885). In all of these works, the discriminatory social policies they expose are tightly entangled with environmental destruction. Her analysis of Our Mutual Friend demonstrates first that Lizzie Hexam's response to her degraded environment also criticized the social structures that created it. With education, however, an individual would be able to "seek a healthier livelihood" and "overcome the limitations the system imposes (53). Betty Higden's story serves as an example of the way the novel critiques "poorhouses and workhouses," which "were supposed to allow for the 'moral cleansing' and social uplift" but instead "only served to deprive individuals of their dignity and to perpetuate environmental injustice" (54).

Azer Benu Kemaloğlu argues in "Dombey and Son: A Reading of Nature" that Dickens uses "green language" (a phrase he adopts from Raymond Williams's The Country and the City [1973])—that is, imagery from natural phenomena—to describe characters' features and interests (such as Paul Dombey's "waves" or Dombey's "thunderbolt" of a temper). Kemaloğlu also discusses the effects of the railroad on both Staggs's Gardens and on Carker as examples of ways Dickens represents the depredations of industrialism on both people and land. He concludes that Dickens should be considered an early eco-critic who makes "a profound and intimate analysis of human relationship to nonhuman world" [sic] (182).

Nancy Aycock Metz makes an inverse argument in her "Landscape Incongruence in Martin Chuzzlewit's Wiltshire," finding not that the social critique contains an eco-critical one, but that the idealized depiction in Chuzzlewit of the Wiltshire landscape contains an implicit social critique. While this depiction seems at first glance to present an idyllic English pastoral space, the English "Home to which America is Away," that presentation is more complex than this dichotomy suggests (234). She demonstrates the ways the land, for the English characters, is evoked in terms of both the eighteenth-century pastoral tradition and of nostalgia, and thus contrasts with the Americans' sense of place, which seemed to Dickens to betray "no awareness of their own embeddedness in time's long sweep" or in tradition (237). However, Metz brings into her discussion the condition of the Wiltshire of the Hungry Forties—the impoverished site of the Swing Riots—and reminds us that in his evocations of this space, Dickens places Pecksniff, that satiric exemplar of "greed, power, chance, and self-interest in the creation of a land-owning class connected by national mythology to notions of nobility" (240). She concludes that "Dickens still wants to believe in the spiritual profit derivable from beautiful natural surroundings, which are often, as the novel also demonstrates, the sites of monstrous predation, even murder" (242).

Psychological Environments

Tingting Tang and Lihui Liu construct a Lefebvrian reading of Great Expectations in "Pip's Cognitive Development in Great Expectations From the Viewpoint of Space Product" [sic]. They take from Lefebvre's The Productions of Space (1991) the concepts of "first space" (which is objective and physical) and "second space" (which is psychological) and join these with Edward Sojo's concept of "third-space," a "bridg[ing]" of the first two to argue that with each new first space (from the "country" to Satis House to London) Pip's values change (53). Then, in the "second space" of "interior monologues and conversations of the young Pip and the old Pip," he matures through "self-examination and self-accusation" (54). The "thirdspace" integration of these first and second "spaces" is signaled in images like "the mist" and "the forge" that recur through the novel and signify, in the end, Pip's maturity.

Empire

In "'Saving British Natives': Family Emigration and the Logic of Colonialism in Charles Dickens and Caroline Chisholm," Terra Walston Joseph examines Dickens's apparently shifting ideas about emigration as these coincide or conflict with one of his era's most passionate apologists for emigration schemes, Caroline Chisholm (considered to be the original of Bleak House's Mrs. Jellyby). The "central tenets" of Chisholm's emigration system were designed to ensure that Britain's colonies become "sister" nations (265, 266). Chisholm held that colonies should become self-sustaining rather than simple "labor pipeline[s]" sending resources to the home country (264). So that British domestic and moral arrangements could be more easily replicated, she also advocated for the emigration of whole families in groups, with several families emigrating together, all supported by loans from the Family Colonization Load Society, repayment of which encouraged connection to the home country. In these ways, colonies would "build a sense of national community across oceans" (266). This ethic of self-reliance and Victorian domestic morality coincided with the Dickens of David Copperfield, as Joseph shows in her discussion of the emigration outcomes of the Micawber and Peggotty families. However, his portrayal is "ambiguous," she says, because the "Australian success … is achieved through isolation and obscurity" instead of the close connection to Britain that Chisholm advocated (267). By the time he was writing Bleak House, Joseph demonstrates, Dickens had become more aware of the racial conflicts that "were an inevitable result of colonial settlement" (270), and so he invents Mrs. Jellyby's Borrioboulah-Gah scheme, a scheme that combines a "civilizing mission" and a "settlement project" whose agendas conflict (272). The first of these "at least pretended" to attend to the condition of natives, while the second was more interested in displacement, assimilation, or genocide (272). Dickens problematizes Chisholm's ideas by writing indigenous people back into "settler space" and reminding readers that to succeed, emigration projects must include a plan for dealing with native populations (273).

Joseph discusses Chisholm's schemes for family emigration, but Tamara S. Wagner attends to the actual experiences of emigrating families, especially children, as they made their voyages in "Children On Board: Transoceanic Crossings in Victorian Literature." Wagner begins with a contextual study of changing technology, the propaganda in standard emigration manuals, and experiences of migrating families as recorded in letters and diaries. Setting Dickens's and Hesba Stretton's views on emigration into this context, she concludes that while neither author was wholly against emigration, both were critical of and interested in reforming it. Martin Chuzzlewit, American Notes, and Stretton's 1862 Household Words article "Aboard an Emigrant Ship" express the disillusionment caused by the disjunction between emigration propaganda and the realities of steerage and even middle-class quarters. Wagner ends her study with an analysis of Ethel Turner's "settler fiction," a sub-genre that "eschewed [the] pat endings" and "sentimental vignettes" of most Victorian representations of emigration (79). Turner's novels, Wagner demonstrates, provide detailed accounts of the journey and fully developed child characters who experience the dangers and disillusionments glanced at in less detail by Dickens and Stretton. Wagner concludes that "the symbolic potential of the suffering child" was deployed in different ways for different aims in the many diverging genres addressing transoceanic travel (69).

Stephanie Polsky considers The Mystery of Edwin Drood to be the first portrayal of opium abuse as a cause of criminality and deterioration in the British national character in "The Novel Ingestion of Opium and Orientalism in The Mystery of Edwin Drood." She reminds us that earlier in the century, opium was considered a medicine when consumed as laudanum and a form of decadent experimentation among the elite classes when smoked. She supplies a history of the triangular opium trade (opium-silver-tea) which resulted in the massive addiction of the Chinese and then of the British, although Victorians initially saw no connection between the imperialist policy and its sad consequence. It was Drood, she claims, that changed the public view of opium consumption. In the novel, she contends, Dickens illustrates the dangers of degeneration attendant upon imperialist policies: metropole and colony threaten to become one another in geographic spaces (a little England in Egypt, an orient in the East End of London) and this change is also reflected in individuals, as with the Princess Puffer, whose opium-smoking seems to be turning her Chinese. Thus the "Orient and its commodities" present a "growing threat … to the integrity of the British self" (17). Polsky also discusses the presentation of racial degeneration in Dickens's article "On An Amateur Beat," degeneration that he predicts will occur "through the wombs of its labouring female poor" (21). Thus, figures like Rosa Bud must be kept pure and unlike the Princess Puffer, while men like Edwin Drood must be held to their "marital duties" instead of heading abroad as Drood prefers to do (21).

In "'The Ghost of Slavery' in Our Mutual Friend," Alexandra Neel makes the provocative argument that "Our Mutual Friend is Dickens's answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin" and that "the novel should be read as a sequel to his sections on prisons and slavery in American Notes" (513). She begins with a discussion of "civil death," a medieval legal condition according to which all rights are denied to prisoners accused of treason, noting that the legal and social death thus conferred was also the condition of slaves. John Harmon, she explains, undergoes such a civil death, becoming the "revenant" (525) John Rokesmith whose "double look" (quoting Silas Wegg) and "bad manner" (quoting Bella) express his dual status as a "living-dead man"—or slave—and as a man whose life "among the Cape Wine" (quoting Eugene Wrayburn) implies a past spent as "a Cape wine farmer, and a possible slave owner" in Cape Colony, South Africa (512, 513). Calling upon "Thing Theory," Neel reads Harmon/Rokesmith's history and condition via the things associated with him in the narrative—"Cape wine," "black diamonds," "a mahogany secretary," and the handbills posted on Gaffer's wall, which resemble newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves (512). (Neel includes images of these for comparison.) She demonstrates that his "Solo and Duett" chapter conforms to the conventions of "it-narratives," the "forebears of slave narratives," according to Jonathan Lamb's "Modern Metamorphoses and Disgraceful Tales" (2004) and to "concepts of negative personhood and civil death" found in legal discourse (512). Since John Rokesmith is the "mutual friend" specified in the story, she concludes that according to the novel slavery is "Britain's mutual friend" (513). Thus Dickens, she can assert, "makes good" on his expressed desire to "help the wretched Slave" (Dickens's phrase) by writing a "critique of Britain's continued though veiled support of slavery through its colonial ventures" (513, 527). Addressing the possibly vexed question of representing slavery by means of a white property owner, she claims that doing this keeps the text from "fall[ing] prey to an exhausted and sentimental abolitionist rhetoric" and that "it might … offer us an early portrait of white victimage" (527, 528).

Paul Hockings examines the mid-century illustrations in The Illustrated London News of the Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny in "Disasters Drawn: The Illustrated London News in the Mid-19^th Century" in comparison with ways that related themes such as "Evangelicalism, utilitarianism, industrialization and stereotyping … were at the same time being explored in the novels of Charles Dickens" (21). Hockings focuses first on Ireland, demonstrating with several images from the ILN the ways illustrations documented these disasters with "harrowing sketches" that brought out "the maximum of pathos in the situation" (28). This approach, he observes, harmonized with the sentimental tendency in Dickens's novels, which Hockings illustrates by referring to Paul Dombey's death (36–37). In coverage of the Indian Mutiny, by contrast, Hockings demonstrates that the illustrations tended to cause "a continuing state of repulsion" against the native rebels since they were most often "sketches of violent acts" committed by them (43). He concludes that this publication "contributed a great deal to the formation of what humanists have called a Victorian sensibility" (44).

Jane Lydon discusses the effects of visual images and stage productions of Jo the crossing-sweep in the Australia and New Zealand colonies in "'The Colonial Children Cry': Jo the Crossing-Sweep Goes to the Colonies." The figure of Jo had a powerful impact on imperial attitudes and policies regarding Aboriginal populations in these colonies. Lydon demonstrates that at home Jo "was the keystone of an emotional economy that argued for the priority of the white homeless child over the distant black" via Dickens's critique of "telescopic philanthropy," but in the colonies the affective power of this figure inspired various positions (320). The predominant one held that white settlers had "superior moral claims" on the charity that is supposed to begin at home and that treating Aboriginals humanely "at the expense of white settlers" was considered unethical (323). Thus, she shows, an argument premised on geographical proximity shifted to one premised on "racial proximity" and promoted "a shared anglophilic culture and identity" (323, 324). Earlier interpretations of telescopic philanthropy among missionaries did include the notion of alleviating Aboriginal misery instead of misery in other places or helping nearer natives instead of more distant ones, but the racial position became more predominant as urban industrial troubles began to appear in cities like Melbourne and Sidney. In this way, Lydon traces the development in attitudes whereby "the conflation of the London nomade and Indigenous blacks across the Victorian arts had first signalled their similarity and potentially their rival claims to sympathy," but by the late nineteenth century "the emotional regime symbolized by Jo the crossing-sweep effectively consolidated racial exclusions" (324).

Siobhan Carroll portrays Dickens as an unquestioning promoter of "an alliance between the imperial state and literary speculation" in An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (15). Carroll's interest is not, however, in "blank" places on the maps that became colonized, but in those that "even into the early twentieth century retained their association with blankness" (5–6): the poles, the sea, the atmosphere, and the subterranean spaces she calls "underworlds." Naming these spaces "atopias," she defines them as "'real' natural regions falling within the theoretical scope of contemporary human mobility, which, because of their intangibility, inhospitality, or inaccessibility, cannot be converted into the locations of affective habitation known as 'place'" (6). These are dangerous spaces; occupation of them is "imagined as temporary and is usually associated with mobile peoples—explorers, exiles, refugees, bandits, and mutineers—who have no place in, or who have been physically dis-placed from, the space of the nation" (7). Literature, Carroll claims, emerges "as a technology via which Britain can exert control over the anomalous spaces of its empire" (9). In her history, she demonstrates that earlier authors "try to impose limits on imperial expansion," while later ones, including Dickens, "use atypical [sic—I think this should read "atopical"] spaces as the backdrop for stories asserting the ability of literature to maintain national cohesion in environments that science and military force alone could not claim" (10).

Carroll's study devotes a chapter to each atopia, and her reading of Dickens and The Frozen Deep forms a section of the chapter on the Arctic. She sets this section in the context of the Franklin expedition and the controversy surrounding Inuit reports that the men had resorted to cannibalism. Dickens's stance in this controversy was to defend the British character, and Carroll quotes from his essay in Household Words on the subject, showing that his defense rests on an imperialist and racist construction of the Inuits, whose "chatter of … uncivilized people" he dismisses in favor of Franklin's own account of earlier expeditions in his autobiography (quoted on 66). Turning to The Frozen Deep itself, then, Carroll explains that the play "transformed speculation" about what happened to the men, or about the ways British men would behave in this atopia "into spectacle," and so "gave new legitimacy to fiction as an interpreter of polar space and as a powerful shaper of Britain's imperial identity" (69). Dickens's play, therefore, "helped prove to Britons the disinterested objectives of their own empire" and "that no matter how far the circuits of empire might transport [them], their essential character will remain unchanged" (70).

Neo-Victorianism

In her 2010 DSA survey of Dickens studies, Shari Hodges Holt included a section on "Recent Adaptations: Graphic Novels, Films, and Fiction" in which she surveyed not just adaptations of Dickens's works into new media, but also several works that recreate new characters and stories set in the Victorian period, often ones in which Dickens and his circle appear as characters—Dan Simmons's Drood among them. Not quite "adaptations," strictly speaking, nor yet scholarly studies of Dickens's influence on later authors or different cultures, nor even less studies of Dickens's representations of his milieu in London or other places, works of fiction like these have continued to appear in recent years, enough to call them a sub-field, "Neo-Victorianism," that will be of interest to both Victorianists and those who focus on contemporary literatures and cultures. A brief look back over the surveys of the years between Holt's in 2010 and mine in 2015 reveals the categories that separately make up what I am combining here under "Neo-Victorianism": "Places and Spaces: Internationalism and the Urban Imagination" (Elizabeth Bridgham, 2012), "Urban and Cosmopolitan Contexts" (Nancy Aycock Metz, 2011), "Global Dickens" and "The City and Modernity" (Caroline Reitz, 2013), and "Cityscapes and Spaces" and "Global Dickens" (Natalie B. Cole, 2014). Together these titles indicate the concerns that are taken up by neo-Victorian writers and their scholars. Julian Wolfreys summarizes this variety of approaches: revisions of specific Victorian texts, use of Victorian characters in new stories, and imitations of Victorian conventions. Any or all of these approaches are taken by postcolonial, neo-capitalist, neo-imperial, and especially neo-Dickensian writers from both the former British Empire and from the U.K. Around this literature, a body of criticism has begun to appear; such work is the focus of this section.

In "A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012," Peter Kirwan and Charlotte Matthieson argue that a "demonstrable tension in … global politics" marked the Dickens 2012 and World Shakespeare Festivals (228). These festivals were to celebrate the global reach of their respective authors; both included significant international participation and events that highlighted cultural afterlives of the authors. The Shakespeare festival, for example, included the "Globe to Globe" productions in which Shakespeare's plays were staged by companies from all over the world in the Globe Theatre, while Dickens 2012 included the British Council's "Sketches by Boz; Sketching the City" and "The Uncommercial Traveller" projects in which "Dickensian modes of representing locality" inspired Dickensian journalistic explorations of cities on every continent (240). However, as Kirwan and Matthieson explain, the festivals, despite this seemingly global reach, contained a troubling literary imperialism: both "assert[ed] the prominence of London as cultural centre and privileged this space as the location of authorial meaning" (229). The creation of the new postal code "E20," for example, seemed to insist too much on place as the most important determinant of national identity. Emphasis on "the value of 'treading in Dickens's footsteps'" similarly privileged the experience of London as the key to understanding Dickens (238). It is these assertions of literary executorship over two authors whose works have become part of the cultural memories of people across the world in multi-faceted and unpredictable ways that Kirwan and Matthieson wish to question.

Frederica Zullo takes up the postcolonial strand of Neo-Victorianism in Metropolis, Empire and Modernity: The Dickensian Legacy in Neo-Victorian and Post-Colonial Literature, arguing that while neo-Victorian writers bring to the surfaces and centers of their works topics and peoples that were repressed, marginalized, or silenced in Victorian literary culture, they do not aim simply to criticize the period. Rather, their interest is to explore that marginality and engage critically with "unofficial versions of history" and "blurred boundaries of social codes and morality" (11). In this way, she says, the works participate in the postmodernist penchant for pastiche and parody. They also, however, revive "bygone literary codes as constitutive elements" in ways that cause the "refraction" of one text "unfolding itself on the basis and in the light of a previous text" (12, 14). Within this neo-Victorian branch of postmodern literature, Zullo's focus is on postcolonial writers who engage with Dickens's novels, influences, and environment, specifically as these engage with imperial matters.

In her introduction, Zullo examines the ways the colonies and their peoples come to perform particular functions in Dickens's work. In the novels, they serve as "elements of disturbance" that can cause "sudden changes or dénouments in intricate situations" (22). Noting that Dickens supported voluntary emigration but not penal transportation, she claims that the colonies function in his fiction as ideal places to send problematic characters who can start productive new lives there; yet at the same time, they serve as places from which such characters could "suddenly re-emerge" (23). Magwitch is just such a figure because he makes his fortune in Australia but also expresses Dickens's critique of the penal system and the intractability of social hierarchy. One important imperialist element through which she examines the novels is the Othering discourse, which reads social class and racial identities in terms of childhood (both the masses and indigenous peoples were children of the mother country)—an ideology that makes colonial space into "a necessary condition" for "starting the civilization process" (31). Dickens, she claims, was "fearful" of the tendency in this Othering process to equate the domestic lower classes with colonial others because of his conviction that the nation should not devote resources to civilizing other peoples when the domestic population was in desperate conditions (32). Zullo demonstrates that Dickens's views of the colonial Others shifted, along with those of the British public generally, after the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, a shift illustrated in the pre-Rebellion imperial discourse of "exoticism, luxury, and strangeness" associated with India that appears in Dombey and Son and the contrasting anxiety about the state of Englishness that suffuses the post-Rebellion (and post-Jamaica Rebellion) Mystery of Edwin Drood (47).

Zullo takes Dickens's journalistic and novelistic responses to the Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace as context for her discussion of two neo-Victorian post-colonial novels, J. G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda (1988). While Dickens, she says, had no argument with the Great Exhibition's celebration of English identity, he opposed the idea of imperial glory purchased "at the price of domestic misery" (110). Zullo reads Bleak House and Little Dorrit as expressions of this critique. Bleak House and Esther's new house represent "ideal places for the rising middle class … in opposition to a Palace which … does not mirror the intimacy of British life," while the Circumlocution Office of Little Dorrit critiques "bourgeois abdication of social responsibility" (116, 117). Farrell's Siege expresses a similar critique of the decolonization period in mid-twentieth-century Britain via the representation of those Victorian colonists who, in the novel, become "skeptic[al] of the rhetoric of the Great Exhibition" and disillusioned with the imperial project in response to the 1857 Rebellion, for which they are unprepared and by which they are "displaced" and "disoriented" (130, 131). As Little Dorrit represents the "abdication of social responsibility," Siege represents a woeful failure in these colonists to know their colony. Carey's Oscar and Lucinda retells the story of the Australian colony via an attempt by the characters to reproduce the Crystal Palace outside Britain, a project, Zullo maintains, that "is [too] intimately Victorian" to imitate elsewhere (140). The novel, she says, is filled with those "bizarre characters, rebels, drop-outs, and a tremendous theft," all of which constituted the founding of the colony but which "evade the official national narratives" (142).

Stephanie Polsky's Ignoble Displacements: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London seeks a history to explain the development of modern neo-liberal governmental policies and social ideologies that have come to characterize contemporary Britain. She finds this history in the rise of liberal practices and ideologies that developed in the shift from eighteenth-century mercantilism to nineteenth-century industrial and finance capitalism. In her readings of Dickens's writings, she charts both the latter systems and Dickens's critiques of them. She finds moments, too, in which Dickens participates in the short-sightedness of his era, particularly with regard to matters involving race and empire. She contends that Victorian liberalism is the root of modern neo-liberal economic policy and shows how the current dire condition of the British working classes stems from the modern replication of both ideology and material effects of liberal Victorian policies regarding distribution of wealth and other necessities like housing and employment.

Her first chapter tackles the policies in Britain that she says have caused a housing crisis in London, contending that Dickens had already diagnosed the problems that would ensue when policies like the 1834 Poor Law would cause the poorest citizens to "disappear from public scrutiny" (as with Tom-All-Alone's) (61). Her second chapter takes on the world of finance capitalism, tracing the emergence of joint-stock banks and of the Bank of England as a global institution in the wake of the Great Panic of 1825—the backdrop for Little Dorrit. She unpacks Dickens's careful representation of the social consequences of rapacious capitalism in order to demonstrate the roots of the current crisis in Britain with its "precarious labor-market for the working classes," "privatised carceral system," "rationale of military intervention abroad to suit neo-imperial corporate interests," and "forced transfer of wealth from an expanding class of debtors to an ever-narrowing class of privileged and powerful creditors" (140).

In her third chapter, she explores the centrality of Magwitch's colonial experience (making a fortune, making and "owning" a gentleman) to the novel in order to elaborate a critique of both Victorian imperialism and modern neo-imperialism. In both these systems, "great expectations" are "precariously" sustained by "rough labour practices both at home and abroad" (142). The charter for belonging to the new gentlemanly class, the "sons of empire," relies on the exclusion of undesirable individuals (141).

In chapter 4, Polsky critiques neo-imperial and neo-colonial arrangements that create a "nostalgic, sanitised image" of the former empire and "sanctify" new imperial practices today (205). Among these practices, she includes attempts by Western nations to spread democracy to other cultures, which she likens to Victorian manifest destiny, and the expansion of commercial imperialism in both societies, with the East India Company and the 1857 Rebellion serving as her primary subjects. Interestingly, she reads not The Mystery of Edwin Drood but A Tale of Two Cities as Dickens's response to the Rebellion, finding that response to be a failure to look critically at his own nation's projection of a "naturalised class inequality" (265) onto its colony, or to see this projection as a force propelling rebellion.

Polsky's calls her epilogue a "Dickensian critique" of a 2013 speech by David Cameron that called, "in a political tone reminiscent of Our Mutual Friend's Mr. Podsnap" (7), for permanent economic austerity. She criticizes this speech and the policies it lays out for the same reasons that Dickens criticized Victorian social policies in his novels. An ascendant middle class, she observes, has control of both government policy and moral discourse so that the working classes "find themselves under constant scrutiny [and] loudly excoriated … for their perceived lack of moral values and anti-social behaviour," while being "assured that social mobility remains in their reach" if they work hard enough and behave well (279). As she draws her comparisons between Victorian liberal and modern neo-liberal systems, she points out that liberal policy developed "spaces" for economic competition while contemporary neo-liberal policy "governs these spaces" in a shift from the classic laissez-faire principles in which a society governs "because of the market" to one in which a society governs "for the market" (283). In this contemporary condition, the "homo economicus" is a "man of enterprise" instead of an eighteenth-century "man of exchange" or nineteenth-century "man of consumption" (283). Against this heartlessly mechanistic, materialistic state of affairs, Polsky proposes a Dickensian alternative, as she understands him to have elaborated in Our Mutual Friend: "mutuality" or "friendship" in which the classes are bound together by "elective affinities" rather than by "deriving calculated worth" (290).

The collection Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics, edited by Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, focuses specifically on ways neo-Victorian authors "resurrect" or "reinvent" Victorian metropolises (1). Cities, they explain in their introduction, are at once unreadable because always multitudinous and metamorphosing, and "legible" because reified in landmarks. Any "represented city," therefore, will always be "haunted by another vaster spectral city of unrepresentability" (3, 4). Neo-Victorian delineators of Victorian cities have produced a variety of tropes by which they attempt to capture this "kaleidoscopic sensory overload and phantasmagoric hyperreality," including the "palimpsest," the "labyrinth," and the "whore of Babylon" (6). Kohlke and Gutleben note that just as Victorians in their own "'reconstructions of earlier cities … met the same forms of life from which they had tried to escape'" (36, quoting U. C. Knoepflmacher's "The Novel between City and Country" [1973]), practitioners of neo-Victorian reconstructions of Victorian cities reencounter the same vivid patchwork of social, moral, and ethical inequalities "intensified … by global capitalism and its dubious asserted 'virtues'" that we recognize from our own time (37). Thus, contemporary representations of the metropolis "haunt their predecessors" and confront us with a "paradoxical (post)modernism" in the "nineteenth-century urban milieu" (37). The collection contains four chapters that discuss neo-Victorian works in interaction with Dickens's writing.

In "Neo-Victorian Cities and the Ramifications of Global Capitalism in Ayeesha Menon's Mumbai Chuzzlewits," Nathalie Vanfasse argues that in its recontextualizing of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, the Menon's BBC radio play The Mumbai Chuzzlewits (2012) shows how fully Dickens understood modern metropolises: that they "promote spectacular success … while also harbouring appalling vices and crimes" and that in them terrible poverty "cohabit[s] with the greatest privileges" (83, 86). Vanfasse draws out the many parallels between the cities of Mumbai and Dubai as represented in the play between London and the American cities of Martin Chuzzlewit, along with the system by which "migration flows" are intimately implicated in the "cash nexus linking economic hubs across the world" (85). Because the scale of this system has grown dramatically from Victorian to neo-Victorian worlds, Vanfasse demonstrates that the radio play reveals "essential features of global capitalism at work in today's urban environment" (71).

In "'Part Barrier, Part Entrance to a Parallel Dimension': London and the Modernity of Urban Perception," Julian Wolfreys demonstrates that the "register of representation" in the neo-Victorian works he analyzes is "avowedly phenomenological," while that register is still only "implicit or imminent" in Victorian novels (127). He makes his case by comparing passages describing the characters' experiences of cities in novels by Peter Ackroyd, Charles Palliser, Peter Carey, and Sarah Walters to similar passages in Dickens's writings. He demonstrates in this densely exemplified set of readings that while Dickens's narrators encounter "the urban sublime as an aporetic experiences," the neo-Victorian "narrating subject meets no such aporia"; instead, he or she "pursues image after image of the city—and thus his or her own en-worlding" (131). This subjective perception—"in which self and world are coterminous, rather than merely contiguous"—is the "phenomenological poetics of subjective perception" at the heart of neo-Victorian narration, one he claims was not yet available to Victorians (130).

In "Mapping Gothic London: Urban Waste, Class Rage and Mixophobia in Dan Simmons's Drood," Mariaconcetta Costantini begins her analysis with a discussion of the ways Victorian authors of the mid-Victorian period brought Gothic imagery into their representations of urban spaces, using especially the labyrinth and the underworld as tropes expressing the anxiety about the "proximity of … hidden space[s] of abjection" and of "violence and barbarity" that seem to threaten "the civilised surface" (176). Dan Simmons's neo-Victorian Drood reimagines this Gothic London, she argues, in ways that highlight the "grievances of our age," including neo-imperialism and neo-capitalism (177). For example, in its portrayals of the London underworld and the characters who encounter it (a fictionalized Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and police detective named Hatchery), the novel foregrounds grievances against neo-imperialism. It creates "multivalent tropes of Otherness" that Costantini says "deconstruct the ideological fixity of racial assumptions," including a "counter-discourse" in which Hatchery identifies the British themselves as the worst of the "criminal undergrowth," not the foreigners (185, 186).

Susan K. Martin focuses specifically on neo-Victorian novels that are set in or center their action on Victorian cemeteries in "Neo-Victorian Cities of the Dead: Contemporary Fictions of the Victorian Cemetery." Arguing that the most recent development in neo-Victorian fiction is that "death becomes the new sex" (204), she demonstrates the ways that Lee Jackson's The Welfare of the Dead (2005), Tracy Chevalier's Falling Angels (2001), Drood (2009), and Lyn Shepherd's Tom-All-Alone's (2012) transfer the "thrill of the forbidden" from matters that shocked Victorians to matters that can still be for us sources of "fascination and frisson" (202): the "exposure of the dead body," pedophilia, incest, and the "physical filth" that she claims makes cemeteries the new "obscene places" (204). This death in the city theme enacts, she suggests, the "killing … of life into commodity" which underpins the commercial metropolis and the idea that death itself becomes a commodity in a profitable industry (206). She contextualizes her readings with a discussion of the establishment of Garden Cemeteries outside the city beginning in the 1820s. Her review of these recent novels concludes that they "teeter on the brink of a fetishisation of Victorian elements" (212), just as Dickens was sometimes perceived to do, because, for all their critique of his "trading in mourning and death as literary commodities," these novels do the same, "however ironised" (213).

________

To the dedicated and exhausted souls who have made it all the way to the end of this survey, I wish you the most gratifying and productive "long strange trips" of your own through the studies you encounter in your research. If 2015 is any indication, they will be intriguing.

For convenience (and by way of conclusion), I include below an alphabetical list of Dickens's major works that indicates which sections of the above survey include scholarship in which they are treated with some depth.

American Notes
Biographical, Aesthetics, Empire

Barnaby Rudge
Intermediality

Bleak House
General, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Bodies, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Environments, Empire, Neo-Victorianism

Christmas Books, various
Biographical, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Bodies

David Copperfield
Biographical, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Modes of Reading, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Empire

Dombey and Son
Ethics, Aesthetics, Bodies, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Environments, Empire, Neo-Victorianism

Great Expectations
General, Biographical, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Modes of Reading, Bodies, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Environments, Neo-Victorianism

Hard Times
General, Ethics, Childhood-Adulthood-Family

Journalism, including Sketches by Boz and Uncommercial Traveller
Bibliographical, Biographical, Aesthetics, Bodies, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Environments, Empire, Neo-Victorianism

Life of Our Lord
Ethics

Little Dorrit
Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Modes of Reading, Childhood-Adulthood-Family, Neo-Victorianism

Martin Chuzzlewit
Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Bodies, Environments, Empire, Neo-Victorianism

Mystery of Edwin Drood
Aesthetics, Modes of Reading, Bodies, Empire

Nicholas Nickleby
Aesthetics, Childhood-Adulthood-Family

Old Curiosity Shop
Biographical, Ethics, Intermediality, Bodies

Our Mutual Friend
Biographical, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Modes of Reading, Bodies, Environments, Empire, Neo-Victorianism

Pickwick Papers
Biographical, Ethics, Aesthetics, Intermediality, Environments

A Tale of Two Cities
Ethics, Modes of Reading, Bodies, Neo-Victorianism