The One, Other, and Only Dickens by Garrett Stewart (review)

In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously posits that if we could develop a "keen vision" for "ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar that lies on the other side of silence" (Penguin, 2003: 194). In The One, Other, and Only Dickens, Garrett Stewart takes as his object not ordinary life but the extraordinary style of the "one and only" Charles Dickens. But what he finds there recalls the overwhelming roar of the minute auditory effects Eliot evokes. For buried beneath the stories familiar to readers of Dickens are, Stewart reveals, a vast landscape of "microdramas" (xviii) unfolding at the level of the smallest units of sound—syllables, phonemes, single letters—that reveal to us an entirely "Other" Dickens, if only we know where to look for him.

Stewart's book proposes a new way of reading Dickens's prose by attending to how the author's language operates independently of his writing, which here can refer to story elements such as plot and characterization or thematic elements, particularly those embedded in historical context or ideology critique. If the smallest units of language, like Eliot's blades of grass, take on a life of their own in Dickens's prose that exceeds the demands of either story or theme, it is because behind the figure of the writer, Charles Dickens, lurks another, the figure Stewart refers to as the "Other Dickens," who composes strains of auditory meaning that run beneath story's cacophony, and whose relationship to the demands of that story are flexible and ever-changing. Stewart aims primarily to teach readers how to locate this Other Dickens at work. His book does so by modeling a form of what he calls "immersive reading" (x) that allows readers to absorb themselves in the sounds that volley between sentences, words, and syllables and to lose themselves in the experiences of auditory pleasure and linguistic free play this immersion allows. The book itself reflects these aims in its construction: Stewart often eschews direct interventions into critical debates about particular novels or Dickens's oeuvre more broadly in favor of a series of reflections on passages from novels such as Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Dombey and Son, in which meaning is derived from the phenomenological account of language that Stewart unfolds in the course of his readings.

Across these examples of intensely local linguistic attention, however, several overarching arguments take shape. In the first chapter, Stewart posits that the freewheeling linguistic play of the "Other Dickens" might have emerged as a subliminal response to Dickens's early training in stenography as a Parliamentary reporter, an experience Dickens fictionalized in David Copperfield. Detailing the ways Victorian shorthand eliminates vowels and, with them, the markers of human breath from transcription, Stewart proposes that Dickens's experiences with this method of compression may have provoked a compensatory production of a surfeit of sounds once he turned to fiction. In the second chapter, Stewart considers how this drive towards sonic "intensity" (xi) was reinforced by Dickens's readings of Shakespeare, tracking parallels in the way small units of sound echo evocatively through each author's work. In doing so, Stewart tells anew a familiar story about how Dickens's lifelong grappling with the labor undertaken as part of his humble beginnings is ultimately what helped launch him to the heights of canonicity. Rather than view the heightened sounds of Dickens's prose as hyperbolic or caricatured, Stewart instead makes the case that we read them as a crucial hinge between the sounds of Shakespearean verse and the linguistic intricacy that characterizes modernists such as Conrad, Faulkner, or Joyce, whom Stewart casts as successors to Dickens's unique form of sound-play.

Most compelling is Stewart's account, which runs throughout the book, of how this sound-play can help us reimagine the relationship between...