Project MUSE®: Dickens Quarterly - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Dickens Quarterly.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32 (2015) through current issueLatest Articles: Dickens QuarterlyTWOProject MUSE®Dickens Quarterly2169-53770742-5473Latest articles in Dickens Quarterly. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Contributors to this Issue
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986513
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Katie Bell received her PhD and MA from the University of Leicester, in English and Victorian Studies respectively, and her BA in English from Georgia State University. She currently teaches British Literature at Dunwoody High School in Georgia. Bell is also one of the blog editors for the Dickens Society, where she has the pleasure of working on new projects related to Dickens studies.Katherine J.Kim is an associate professor at Molloy University. A graduate of Boston College (PhD) and the University of Chicago (AB and AM), she conceived of and co-organized the Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial Celebration, which led to a Boston Public Library exhibit and a permanent public statue. Among other projects, Katherine has
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallContributors to this Issue2026-03-31text/htmlen-USContributors to this Issue2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®47642026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31From the Editor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986514
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The current issue is the first of two devoted to the general topic of "Dickens and Other Writers, from Romanticism to Modernism." We begin with articles devoted to Dickens and Mary Shelley (and Milton); Dickens, Blake, and Wordsworth; Dickens and Hugo; and Dickens and Poe. The June 2026 issue will include articles on Dickens and a number of more recent writers, from Emily Dickinson to Vladimir Nabokov. All of these pieces will encourage Dickensians to look beyond our mutual object of study, while also shedding further light on Dickens himself.It remains striking that there is a lack of recent work on the connections and parallels that might seem most obvious: between Dickens and other British novelists of his time.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallFrom the Editor2026-03-31text/htmlen-USFrom the Editor2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®34462026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Milton's Ill-Mated Marriages in Frankenstein and Great Expectations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986515
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It has often been said that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel without equal, with Joyce Carol Oates commenting that it is "a remarkable work: a novel sui generis—if a novel at all—and a unique blending of Gothic, fabulist, allegorical, and philosophical materials" (106). It is known that Dickens owned a copy of this novel, and the profound influence it exerted over him as he crafted Great Expectations (1860–61) has long been recognized, with Iain Crawford arguing in 1988 that Dickens's novel was an "elaborate reworking" of Frankenstein (625). Crawford's contention is one that would be developed by Jerome Meckier, who argued that Great Expectations served as a "reply" to Mary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallMilton's Ill-Mated Marriages in Frankenstein and Great Expectations2026-03-31text/htmlen-USMilton's Ill-Mated Marriages in Frankenstein and Great Expectations2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®790032026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31On Innocence: Dickens, Blake, and Wordsworth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986516
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Throughout my engagement with Dickens, I have been pondering over possible relationships between him and William Blake (1757–1827), and actively working on these in a current project, part of which involves trying to assemble evidence for what awareness Dickens might have had of Blake. Dickens's relationship with Shakespeare and with eighteenth-century writers is obvious, and, amongst the Romantics, his acquaintance with Byron's work stands out—for example in Steerforth; but there is obviously more to be explored. Subtler sources and intuitions were to be gained from Romantic poetry in the 1830s and 1840s. Dickens's possible relation to Blake in this regard has always been a teasing issue for me. In what follows
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallOn Innocence: Dickens, Blake, and Wordsworth2026-03-31text/htmlen-USOn Innocence: Dickens, Blake, and Wordsworth2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®638312026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Dazed Survivor in Dickens and Hugo
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986517
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After a day of work in the office of a Soviet labor camp during his second prison term, the journalist and children's writer Lev Razgon filled up a thick notebook with memoirs of his young days. On recollecting the unguided readings of his pre-revolutionary adolescence, when he got access to books of a nationalized gentry estate, he thinks about his emotional relief on moving from translations from the French to those of Scott, Fielding, Dickens, and Thackeray. In his imagination Hugo's heroes, in particular,
would assume traits of people close to me, my friends, my own traits. This is maybe why I disliked (and still dislike) books in which people kill those close to them for the sake of words and ideas, however
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallThe Dazed Survivor in Dickens and Hugo2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Dazed Survivor in Dickens and Hugo2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®576322026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Purloined Heart: Affinities between Edgar Allan Poe and Early Works of Charles Dickens
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986518
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Although Edgar Allan Poe is remembered as a poet and writer of Gothic tales, he earned his living (albeit a meagre one) as a journalist, writing more literary criticism than poems or tales. From 1835 until his death in 1849, Poe wrote approximately one thousand critical pieces and defined "a national standard for book reviewing" (Hutchisson 57). In these critiques, he called for American literature to be held to the same standards to which European literature was held. Poe also critiqued many American newspapers that deemed American fiction of higher value than its contemporaries, merely because the literature was of American origin.1 In his biography of Poe, James M. Hutchisson writes, "After the Revolution
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallThe Purloined Heart: Affinities between Edgar Allan Poe and Early Works of Charles Dickens2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Purloined Heart: Affinities between Edgar Allan Poe and Early Works of Charles Dickens2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®966122026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Dickens and Switzerland by Christine Gmür (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986519
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At the 2024 Annual Dickens Society Symposium in Birmingham, Michael Hollington cogently argued that Dickens's experience of the Swiss mountainous landscape played a crucial role in shaping the text of Dombey and Son. Not only does the novel feature the first fictional use of the word "avalanche" in Dickens's work, but an "avalanche structure" appears to govern the book from chapter 17 onwards. Paul Dombey's death triggers a cascade of subsequent catastrophes, including Mr. Dombey's disastrous second marriage, the perfidious elopement of Carker, Walter's dispatch to Barbados, and more. At the same time, Hollington noted the absence of a comprehensive study of how the Alpine country figures in Dickens's writing and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallDickens and Switzerland by Christine Gmür (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USDickens and Switzerland by Christine Gmür (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®101192026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels: Dickens, Braddon, and Collins by Sarah Yoon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986520
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Sarah Yoon's study is predominantly concerned with perceptions of the detective in the English novel of the mid-nineteenth century, when the sensation novel was at its peak of cultural popularity. Yoon surveys a selection of the work of well-known authors including Charles Dickens, Mary Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, but also extends the scope of her analysis to encompass lesser-known authors, with the aim of supplementing the "historical understanding of the detective's moral slipperiness and contingency through a reading of sensation novels" (3). The central argument of her study is that Victorian readerships felt an ambivalence towards the detective as both a real figure and as a literary construct, and that "in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallThe Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels: Dickens, Braddon, and Collins by Sarah Yoon (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels: Dickens, Braddon, and Collins by Sarah Yoon (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®146132026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Narratives of Women's Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Melissa Rampelli (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986521
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What do a Charles Dickens novel and the flu have in common? While this question might seem like the beginning of a joke, considering novels and illnesses through similar lenses can be informative. Melissa Rampelli does so in Narratives of Women's Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, which presents detailed research into not just the history of hysteria before and during the nineteenth century, but also social, cultural, and medical conversations that informed and shaped that history. This research scaffolds Rampelli's close readings of five novels. Building on work by Janet Oppenheim, Kathryn Montgomery, D. A. Miller, and others, Rampelli employs what the author calls "the plot of pathology," in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallNarratives of Women's Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Melissa Rampelli (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USNarratives of Women's Health and Hysteria in the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Melissa Rampelli (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®143402026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature by Adrian Tait (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986522
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Ecocritical approaches to Victorian literature are not new, as Adrian Tait recognizes in his introduction to Environmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature. Coming in the wake of vast industrialization and urbanization, Victorian writers confronted a polluted and abnatural world, leading to a novel such as Bleak House becoming "something of an ur-text for eco-critics" (21). What, then, can be done to offer an original environmental angle on Dickens, and on the work of other well-known writers such as Carlyle, Engels, and Ruskin, as well as on Chartist fiction? Tait's answer is to draw on environmental justice studies as a conceptual and methodological resource, suggesting that a "sociocentric focus on issues
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallEnvironmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature by Adrian Tait (review)2026-03-31text/htmlen-USEnvironmental Justice in Early Victorian Literature by Adrian Tait (review)2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®135742026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The Dickens Checklist
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986523
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The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online resources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative and cross-referenced edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at dickenssociety.org, and is updated once a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallThe Dickens Checklist2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe Dickens Checklist2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®610082026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31The David Paroissien Prize
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986524
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The David Paroissien Prize is awarded each year to the best peer-reviewed essay on Dickens published in a journal or edited collection. The Prize is named for David Paroissien (1939–2021), a founding member of the Dickens Society and also the founder of Dickens Quarterly, which he edited from its first issue in 1984 until his final issue in December 2019. As an editor he was rigorous, tactful, and generous, particularly with younger scholars. Under his direction, Dickens Quarterly attracted contributions from Dickens scholars around the world and became a leading venue for new work in the field.To nominate (or self-nominate) an essay for the Paroissien Prize, please provide a copy of the essay and a cover email
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/654/image/coversmallThe David Paroissien Prize2026-03-31text/htmlen-USThe David Paroissien Prize2026-03-312026TWOProject MUSE®81762026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-03-31