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

In Dickensian Affects, Joshua Gooch opens provocative new avenues for Dickens scholars and affect theorists by examining precarity—financial, emotional, and physical—through the lens of affect theory, arguing that the precarity of feeling—or that "to feel is to know the possibility of feeling otherwise"—is evident in the rhythms and patterns of Dickens's novels through Dickens's affective form. Through the choice of novels—Oliver Twist, The Old Curiosity Shop, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations—Gooch joins affect with form set against historical backgrounds to reveal the ways in which Dickens's novels reflect precarity in a time of capitalism. Oliver Twist links domination and violence with the satirical portrait of the New Poor Law and the West Indies apprenticeship system; The Old Curiosity Shop connects anxiety with inheritance laws and land reforms that precipitate financial precarities into emotional ones; David Copperfield pairs surprise and contempt with figurative and financial trust and the Loan Call System; and Great Expectations examines shame through the vulnerability of Victorian masculinity and the Volunteer Force. Gooch's selections span Dickens's career, and the book concludes with an examination of the potential of affective form in recent film adaptations of Great Expectations.

So, what is affective form? It is not a "unified emotional tone," as one might anticipate, "but rather a set of affective conjunctions and disjunctions that one may follow like fractures through sheets of ice" (63). The metaphor illustrates well that affective form is dependent upon layers of differing thickness and depth set unevenly upon one another. Affective form is, in essence, an unstable and shifting ground beneath us offering simultaneous sensations of adventure and danger—a precarity of feeling that can change at any moment. Gooch acknowledges that Dickens might seem unsuited for this study as he tends to be aligned with sentimentality, but to push affect theory into new territory, Gooch suggests we should look to and, more importantly, through Dickens.

One line of thinking about affect in Dickens is rooted in the study of sentimentality and melodrama. Gooch acknowledges that sentimentality, or "this need to feel with undergirds much of Dickens's affective project," but cautions that "sentimentality and sympathy render its subjects as objects and limit who or what seem fit objects for sympathy" (9). To limit our understanding of affect to sentimentality obscures the ways in which Dickens's novels engage other "histor[ies] of the nineteenth century that his works seem to exclude, histories of racial animus, imperial violence, and the invisible industries of finance, insurance, and real estate" (9). If we examine feeling in Dickens as "purposive and potential," then we can discover "an impersonal and asubjective openness and range of potentialities beyond his desired sentimentality or sympathy for the poor" (9). In this sense, Gooch follows groundwork laid by Dickens scholars working on sentimentality, form, and style, including Miriam Bailin, Audre Jaffe, Fred Kaplan, and Garrett Stewart, but forges compelling new pathways through the framework of aesthetics, affect theory, and moral sense philosophy to examine histories and social causes present in Dickens but that previous scholars have not ascribed to him. An understanding of affective form can move us from theory to practice, or can account for the ways in which texts pair or, to use one of Gooch's favourite words, yoke elements together, such as the yoking of violence and satire in Oliver Twist to reflect the economic, social, and political discourses of its day. In the case of Oliver Twist, such discourses included not only the New Poor Law, as many scholars have noted, but also the post-abolition apprenticeship system of the West Indies.

Oliver Twist is famously, in the words of its narrator, like a piece of "streaky, well-cured bacon." It is the novel's "streakiness" that Gooch repeatedly points to as a way to sift the novel's affective form and visualize its affective rifts, the moments of slippage in which we can identify the precarity...