General Critical Studies of Dickens’s Works and Dickens and Aspects of Fiction; General Specialized Studies of Dickens’s Works, Collected and Selected Editions of Dickens’s Works, and Supplementary Studies by Duane DeVries (review)

On page clxix of the introduction to the fourth volume of this mammoth, erudite, comprehensive enterprise, Duane DeVries concludes: “We have at last come to the end of a long pilgrimage.” The two volumes, each in two parts, under consideration here represent the conclusion of a publishing project that stretches back to 2004, when the first volume was published by AMS Press.¹ However, the Dickens Annotated Bibliography series (of which DeVries was the General Editor) can trace its origins to 1978, when Robert L. Patten first recommended DeVries to Garland Publishing, to produce a series of eighteen volumes, covering each of the novels, the shorter works of fiction, nonfiction, drama and poetry, concluding with a final volume which would collect and annotate general bibliographical, textual, biographical, critical and special studies of Dickens. The work under review here is the latter portion of that eighteenth volume, which stretches to four tomes, each worth its weight in gold.

In our digital age, it is all too common for scholars, often guided or pushed by algorithms, to turn to online sources to search for academic studies relevant to their particular research topics. Such facilities abound, and with ever-increasing amounts of information being placed online – not just critical works, but also primary sources, particularly from the Victorian period, for which copyright has expired – there would seem to be no reason to consult hardbound texts to discover all that scholarship has to offer for a particular line of inquiry. Volumes 3 and 4 of this bibliography make it plain that there is so much more to unearth, not just from the period before computers, but right up to 2018, which is where DeVries’s trawl of printed material and digital sources concludes.

Volume 3 (in two sequential tomes) covers general critical studies of Dickens’s work. The first part is broken down into studies published between 1836 and 1870 (the year of the author’s death), from 1871 to 1939 (the year Edmund Wilson first espoused the ideas that crystallised in “Dickens: The Two Scrooges”), and 1940 to date. DeVries categorises “general studies” as those covering three or more of Dickens’s works; his rationale for this classification is that studies of one or two works are generally covered by the Dickens bibliographies devoted to single works, and previously published first by Garland, and then by AMS Press. The second part of volume 3 covers aspects of Dickens’s fiction, including characterization, scene, description, plot, form, structural unity, style, point of view, tone, language, linguistics, speech, themes, allegory, allusions, imagery, symbolism, comic elements, wit, humor, irony, parody and satire. While these classifications may not be absolutely definitive, DeVries maintains that scholars still use these aspects of technique to develop new ways of looking at Dickens’s work; in this sense, the subdivisions go beyond any individual critical approach and still form the basis of how we understand essential aspects of Dickens’s craft. In order to appreciate the value of this part of the work, researchers should move well beyond the taxonomy, and delve into the astute, insightful annotations. DeVries is able to extract expertly the essence of a particular article, book, or doctoral dissertation, and thus save the scholar inordinate amounts of time when considering whether a particular piece will be worthy of further examination. For longer works he provides chapter...