Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change eds. by Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker (review)

Writing to William Macready from Geneva in 1846, Charles Dickens spoke admiringly of the recent revolution: "I believe there is no country on earth but Switzerland in which a violent change could have been effected in the Christian spirit shown in this place, or in the same proud, independent, gallant style" (Letters 4: 646). This collection proves Dickens to have been a keen student of change throughout his life. Its contributors aim to "address the multitudinous ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens's works" (xvii) and consider how Dickens promotes social change, how he presents changes of power, how he changes his own techniques, and finally how his presentation of change has inspired others. However, as with all well-curated compilations, there are significant crosscurrents linking these broad themes, inviting the reader to trace suggestive correspondences between its parts.

One central preoccupation is the role of the individual within the process of change. Jerome Meckier shows how modest changes of heart prove to be more effective than sudden, reactive gestures in The Pickwick Papers, and Joel Brattin identifies the same sentiment prevailing in Bleak House. The good works that Mr. Pickwick and Esther quietly perform are modest acts within their respective "circle[s] of duty" (34), which have an ameliorative effect on those around them, while for Robert Heaman, Carton's personal self-sacrifice is the most enduring catalyst for communal improvement in A Tale of Two Cities. Elsewhere, Meckier regards Scrooge as "the quintessential paradigm for reversal as reform [occurring] independent of politics and legislation" (10), and Brattin extends this genealogy of quiet revolutionaries to Sissy Jupe and Amy Dorrit.

The collection offers up many important instances of straightforward, minor, personal acts of positive change, which, as Nancy Aycock Metz notes, invite readers "to share a compensating optimism in the[ir] value" (80). She points out that Dickens's belief in a non-violent evolution of the species occurs within a wider scientific dialogue that recognized the potency of small actions in affecting great changes over long periods of time, in the manner of water droplets carving out great canyons.

Dickens's work treats the larger interventions that it describes with skepticism as he critiques what Metz calls "the 'catastrophist' paradigm of history, with its emphasis on great men and cataclysmic events" (77). Meckier shows how Pickwick's gentler approach is offset by the transformative brutality meted out to the hypocrite Stiggins, and Brattin traces a similar juxtaposition within Bleak House, in which Esther's domestic revolution is set against a figurative backdrop of more forceful insurrections, including Sir Leicester's fears of mutiny, Boythorne's explosive anger, Krook's combustion, and allusions to the Peasant's Revolt. Despite its enervating effects on his imagination, Dickens never regards the large-scale popular agitation of the mob as the correct vehicle for social change, and his depictions of ruthless, bestial rioters in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities present violent change as a symptom of the failure of moderate politics.

Despite this distrust of collective agitation, several chapters demonstrate how Dickens was also interested in the arguments for wider social change proposed by radical thinkers. Norbert Lennartz challenges perceptions of Dickens as a spokesman for bourgeois cosiness by revealing the "romantic radicalism" (129) within his work, tracing his associations with Hazlitt and Hone, his distrust of the prevailing political and cultural climate, and opposition to the doctrines of Malthus and Utilitarianism. Moments of radical sentiment irrupt from the text of Bleak House, and these find further expression in two popular dramatizations discussed by Chris Louttit. These East End productions from 1853 devote much stage time to the scenes of "low life" in Krook's rag-and-bottle shop, the shooting gallery, and the brickmaker's cottage. While this accords with the commercial popularity of urban melodrama, it also fits within...