Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity by Joshua Gooch (review)

One of the most striking examples of Victorian jitteriness appears in a novel published in 1988, a century after Dickens died: in Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda, Oscar Hopkins, who leaves a punishing childhood in Dorset for a new life in Australia, is both a hardened fidgeter and a gambler. While the novel's nineteenth-century setting is vividly rendered, it is tempting to look sideways at Carey's own context–given its exploration of the thrills and perils of risk, the novel seems to gesture as much to its moment of publication at the height of late capitalism, as the past. With his twitches and tics, Oscar is a minor Dickens caricature who suddenly realises he is a protagonist: someone to take seriously.

For Karen Chase, the nineteenth century witnessed a heightened attention to the fidgeting body; Dickens, she points out, is the supreme observer of fidgets. When a persistent and murkily defined feeling can't be contained, it "erupts" into the world and becomes a fidget: something that can be read as an index of mood or character (7). Chase's project is one of many to complicate accepted narratives of Victorian stateliness and self-satisfaction. Jeff Nunokawa (1994) suggests that, in Victorian fiction, "anything taken will be taken away" (8); Elaine Freedgood (2000) explores "the textual construction of a safe England in a dangerous world between 1832 and 1897" (1); Nicholas Dames (2001) demonstrates how fictional autobiographies "psychologize their own coherence and continuity," ironing out selfhood's contingencies (128). Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (2011) depicts a young Dickens haunted by the other paths he might have taken; finally, it seems likely that Andrew H. Miller's forthcoming On Not Being Someone Else (2020) will extend his work on the "optative mode" (199). Taken together, these studies offer perspectives on what we might call precarity: a state, and prickling sense, of vulnerability (be it personal or collective), which has its roots in socio-political contexts. What, then, was the national mood in nineteenth-century Britain, and how did literature either channel or challenge it? With every sonorous boast about progress came an equal, and opposite, murmur of dread. Precarity neatly fits into this framework because–much like the specter of widescale financial collapse–it problematizes our understanding of Victorian economic power.

In Dickensian Affects, Joshua Gooch contributes to the conversation by bringing together these two strands of thinking. He asks how precarity both can be a social and economic condition and can generate a set of feelings: "Precarity for Dickens is something that is first and foremost felt," he suggests (15). Though the book does not quite offer a working definition of "precarity" on which to build, references to Judith Butler on this topic recur; for Butler, Gooch notes, being precarious implies that "each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerabilities of our bodies" (63; Butler 20). In an initial commentary on literary criticism and economics, Gooch points out that interdisciplinary work of this kind is often fraught with difficulty; his book is a welcome attempt to bring recent developments in affect studies to bear upon the field. For Gooch, "the feeling of life's precarity in Victorian Britain in Dickens includes an insistence that no matter how one may feel, one might soon feel otherwise" (14–15). In order to show how this works, Gooch puts forward a theory of "affective form," which "engages with this problem of a world of rifts by treating form as an arrangement of elements that do and undo, that mean to signal certain feelings and affects but that also may signal something else. The focus falls on what is doing in a system and what can be done when that something doing starts doing something else" (34).

For Gooch, Dickens's fiction "insists on the tight interweaving of affect and precarity in the emotional, economic, and political textures of his conjuncture . . . In their...