Project MUSE®: Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 48 (2017) through current issueLatest Articles: Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian FictionTWOProject MUSE®Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction2167-85100084-9812Latest articles in Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction. Feed provided by Project MUSE®From “Marked”-ness to Mutual Care: Care Communities and the Marriage Plot in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989608
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There is certainly no lack of disabled representation in the work of Charles Dickens; from mental to physical maladies, consisting of both major and minor characters, Dickens’s work often focuses on how disability impacted everyday life in Victorian England. However, less attention has been brought to how Dickens understands disabilities in terms of social ties. These representations are particularly complex and intriguing when the characters are, in the words of Audrey Jaffe, “marked.” Such characters in Dickens’s novels are “eccentric in appearance and character, doomed in general to repeat the same phrases, whistle the same tunes, twitch the same twitches throughout their lives as characters, even if and when
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallFrom “Marked”-ness to Mutual Care: Care Communities and the Marriage Plot in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend2026-05-04text/htmlen-USFrom “Marked”-ness to Mutual Care: Care Communities and the Marriage Plot in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®774162026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Bleak House and Kierkegaard in a Leveling Age
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989609
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When Bleak House’s consummate master of deportment Mr. Turveydrop laments the depths to which his gallant art has fallen, he tells Esther Summerson, “We have degenerated.” Shaking his head, he continues, “A levelling age is not favourable to Deportment. It develops vulgarity” (228). The expression of unease with the reforming age from this would-be aristocrat—in fact hardly a gentleman of means at all, and an obvious target for Charles Dickens’s satire—represents a familiar anxiety among Britons witnessing the turn of revolutions on the continent and reading, with curiosity, Alexis de Tocqueville’s critical speculation that American democracy would “dry up most of the old sources of poetry” (DA 460). De
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallBleak House and Kierkegaard in a Leveling Age2026-05-04text/htmlen-USBleak House and Kierkegaard in a Leveling Age2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®1106412026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Dickens, “The Signalman,” and the Posthuman Subject
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989610
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In 1858, Charles Dickens wrote to his friend, novelist Wilkie Collins, of a recent visit to St. Luke’s Hospital for the Insane, where he met a man “afflicted with incurable madness.” The man’s illness was only discovered when it “began to develop itself in strongly-marked mad actions,” although his doctors believed it had been present for some time. When Dickens asked one of those doctors, Alexander John Sutherland (1810–1867), in what capacity the patient had been employed, Sutherland replied, “Aye, that is the most remarkable thing of all, Mr. Dickens. He was employed in the transmission of electric-telegraph messages; and it is impossible to conceive what delirious dispatches that man may have been sending all
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallDickens, “The Signalman,” and the Posthuman Subject2026-05-04text/htmlen-USDickens, “The Signalman,” and the Posthuman Subject2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®1106602026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Fellow Travelers: Wilson, Orwell, Trilling, Dickens
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989611
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In an essay called “Why Read the Classics?” published in Italian in 1981, Italo Calvino offers fourteen tentative definitions of a classic. He begins with some familiar truisms: the classics are books we reread; they are formative; they leave traces upon a culture; they are voyages of discovery; they stimulate personal rapport with the author; they help define who you are; they carry knowledge you recognize but did not know you had; they show you something new in every rereading. Classics are the books we return to with the sincerest love—they are books we are never finished reading.These definitions are soothing, but Calvino knows they are as gossamer. He admits, “At this point I can no longer put off the vital
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallFellow Travelers: Wilson, Orwell, Trilling, Dickens2026-05-04text/htmlen-USFellow Travelers: Wilson, Orwell, Trilling, Dickens2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®569232026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Interview with Robert L. Patten
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989612
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This continues a series of interviews with senior Victorianists to share reflections on their lives as readers, their academic careers, and the field’s current state, along with other matters. Robert L. Patten is a distinguished American literary scholar and one of the world’s leading experts on Charles Dickens and Victorian print culture. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Princeton University, he served as Professor of Humanities at Rice University, where he taught for decades. Patten is best known for his influential books Charles Dickens and His Publishers and Charles Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author. The London Guardian on World Book Day 1999 named his two-volume biography of George
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallInterview with Robert L. Patten2026-05-04text/htmlen-USInterview with Robert L. Patten2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®501882026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Recent Dickens Studies: 2024
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989613
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As a glance at the programs of the Dickens Fellowship Conference, the Dickens Society Symposium, and the Dickens Universe will easily indicate, conference themes, dialogues, and highlighted novels exert a powerful temporary influence over which texts by Dickens are studied critically each year. Given the delays of writing, researching, and publishing—and allowing for the vicissitudes of personal life and academic work—related scholarship often appears closely following such events. Among the works summarized below, this is particularly obvious in the case of the Dickens Quarterly’s special issue “Dickens and His Publics,” which, published in March 2024, further explored the theme of the Dickens Society Symposium
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallRecent Dickens Studies: 20242026-05-04text/htmlen-USRecent Dickens Studies: 20242026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®2757312026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/989614
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Much of a muchness is a phrase traditionally employed to signal much of the same, a similarity between two things. This volume shares much of a muchness with previous volumes of DSA. However, in 1865, from the mouth of the Dormouse, Lewis Carroll comically turned the phrase’s meaning into an existential question of identity, pointing out its absurdity and riffing on the meaning of muchness, which, since medieval times, signified abundance, to emphasize individuality, change, growth, and energy (vitality). Reading Lydia Craig’s superb review of Dickens studies for 2024, or the sweeping interview with Robert L. Patten in this volume 57 issue, is an invitation to the reader to appreciate much of a muchness in its
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/744/image/coversmallIntroduction2026-05-04text/htmlen-USIntroduction2026-05-042026TWOProject MUSE®65612026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-04