Charles Dickens: But for You, Dear Stranger by Annette Federico (review)

Annette Federico’s But for You, Dear Stranger exemplifies how nuanced and analytical personal responses to literature can be. Rather than solely thinking our way through Dickens’s corpus, Federico demonstrates the rewards to be reaped from feeling our way through as well. She achieves this quietly, but unashamedly, unapologetically, and with admirable honesty. Federico has previous form with such an approach, as evidenced in her 2020 project, My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice, and it shows. The narrative that unfolds is highly creative, at times poetic and even therapeutic through its combined personal and critical engagement with Dickens’s novels. Despite the modest admission from the outset that “I never thought of myself as a Dickens expert” (ix), the breadth and depth of her knowledge and thinking around Dickens, his life and his work are never in question: more importantly for this book, neither is her love for them. But for You, Dear Stranger underscores how personal experience can be used effectively to revitalize areas of literary study and how the personal is not the enemy of the critical.

Federico outlines in the preface that this book, in line with Dickens’s own ethos, is part of an attempt to “grow more childish,” to go on “a pilgrimage away from mere intellectual knowingness toward some other kind of knowledge” (xi), through a consideration of her past, her relationships and herself. This pilgrimage takes the form of three chapters, each one dedicated to a focal novel–Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850) and Little Dorrit (1857), consecutively–with a concluding section about A Tale of Two Cities (1859).

In chapter one, entitled “Where Is Love?,” Federico begins by revealing the loss of her parents and thoughtfully examines her relationships with them. She describes an 1895 decorative plate owned by her parents depicting the first meeting between the Artful Dodger and Oliver (a photo is included), and it is this object which acts as a springboard to reminisce about her and her father’s mutual love of the story. Carol Reed’s film adaptation (1968) of the Oliver! musical, in particular, plays a mythologizing role in this parental relationship, but also in the development of Federico’s consideration of the novel. The film/musical’s central song, “Where Is Love?,” cleverly becomes the hook line–the refrain–of the chapter: a way for Federico to variously probe and tease out the differing forms of love in the novel. In particular, the readings of Nancy stand out here. Love in Dickens is certainly not a new topic, yet Federico’s interweaving of anecdotes and social comparisons breathes new life into this habitual theme.

The second chapter, “Blessed Little Room,” changes focus. It contemplates the role of the reader and the multifarious forms the act of reading can take in relation to David Copperfield. Federico describes her experience of teaching a Dickens course prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. What emerges is a reassuring and relatable insight into how the lockdowns affected her teaching and reading processes. At some point, amongst the restrictions and remote classes, Federico stopped worrying about teaching Dickens and really enjoyed reading the texts. She proposes that “[s]ometimes we have to read with what Marion Milner has called ‘wide attention’ […] without determined purposefulness” (55). Federico convincingly demonstrates the benefits of such reading through observations of “Dickens’s throwaways, the strange, superfluous details that he can’t resist” (55). Stripped of a rigid, critical agenda, just as David “is not a studious, critical reader” (54), she runs through what reading can phenomenologically mean within and without David Copperfield. Reading is “power, it is validating,” “intimacy,” “security” and “projection” (63–64 original emphasis). With these attributes in mind, the theme of marriage in the novel becomes the focus, and a way for Federico to explore her own marital relationships: love and reading are likened, especially when approached with wide attention.

In the...