Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext by Adam Abraham (review)

"This book offers a new kind of reception history," promises Adam Abraham in his prologue to Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext—a promise he fulfills in the five illuminating chapters that follow (19). That said, the book's title is a bit misleading, since Abraham is not that interested in plagiarism itself. The book's subtitle is a more accurate description of its topic. Here Abraham identifies two familiar subgenres and a third that he invents. Acknowledging Gérard Genette's earlier use of "after-text" (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky [University of Lincoln Press, 1997], 399), Abraham loses the hyphen and widens the term's meaning to take in not just authorial versions/revisions, but also the varieties he specifically names in the title and subtitle (18). Moreover, Abraham renames the original-text-plus-aftertext(s) as the "work" which encompasses "the totality of a literary existence" (19). Rather than sideline what many see as mere rip-offs of an original text, Abraham argues that scholars should recognize aftertexts as significant "source[s] of literary knowledge" (20). Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and George Eliot are the novelists around whom Abraham situates the aftertexts. The authors of the decidedly noncanonical productions are either anonymous or long forgotten, with the exception of William Makepeace Thackeray (a premier Bulwer Lytton parodist), along with the somewhat less exceptional Rosina Bulwer Lytton, and Edith Simcox, George Eliot's longtime devotee. Although I have reservations about Abraham's new definition of the so-called work, his analysis constitutes a significant contribution to reception history and to a deeper understanding of the marginal texts that circulated around the canonical originals.

Like the Victorian period itself, Abraham begins with Dickens's The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836–7), a text which launched a thousand aftertexts, not to mention Pickwick cigars, breeches, and chintzes. Focusing on Pickwick imitations, Abraham examines two varieties: club imitations and prostheses (plagiaristic extensions of original characters and plots). While current Pickwick readers might have little or no interest in the club part of Pickwick (Dickens himself lost interest in it), the club imitators made it their raison d'etre. Abraham exhumes three such imitations and gives an engaging account of the ways each imagines club scenes that they believe Dickens "was going to write, meant to write, advertised in the prospectus, or neglected to write" (30). It is not that Abraham thinks these imitations give the real Pickwick a run for his money (he does not), but rather that in them we witness how another group of Dickens's readers actually read the book; in short, they become an untapped resource for reception studies.

Not surprisingly, these aftertextual authors try their hands at Dickensian hyperbole, dialect, and interpolated stories, and Abraham takes them seriously—but not too seriously. Instead of trying to elevate these imitations, Abraham helps us to see Dickens through their eyes and to consider (more specifically) how they tune in to the undercurrents of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexuality that later critics have identified in the novel. So, for instance, examining the more anti-Semitic outgrowths, Abraham argues that they are derived "from the repressed Jewish origins of Samuel Pickwick"; Abraham supports his argument by adducing convincing evidence (his own and that gleaned from other critical works) of the novel's anti-Semitic impulses (48). Perhaps Abraham's most provocative speculation concerns moments in the Pickwick aftertexts that evoke Warren's Blacking well before information about Dickens's past would have been publicly known. Were Dickens's imitators picking up on the references that he could not help but drop into his novels? Giving appropriate credit to Rosemarie Bodenheimer for the work she does in Knowing Dickens (2010), Abraham reads these aftertexts carefully to illuminate what Dickens's contemporary readers might have registered themselves.

If Abraham's work...