Tale of two cities

The  A Tale of Two Cities reading project and blog comes out of a partnership between Dickens Journals Online, and the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester. As part of the celebrations of Dickens’s bi-centenary we read the novel as it first appeared in weekly parts in Dickens’s journal All the Year Round, following the 1859 timing from April to November. We used the online edition of the journal newly available via Dickens Journals Online. The group shared responses and posted questions on our blog (which has now had over 16,000 views). Some bloggers were very familiar with the novel, while others were completely new to it, and all worked to a ‘no spoilers’ rule to try to re-create the 1859 experience as far as was possible. The project has generated new close readings of the novels, with discussions of, for example, Dickens’s use of rhythm and imagery, his characterization (debates about Miss M and Sydney Carton waged hottest), and genre. It has also been instructive about the effects of serialization, the 1859 context, and the relationship between the fiction and other content of All the Year Round.

Reading A Tale of Cities week by week – reflections from some of the regular bloggers

Pete Orford

My experience of the blog sparked several revelations – a reappraisal of the book not only in its serial form, but in the context of the surrounding articles in All the Year Round; the realisation of precisely how long that weekly gap between instalments can be; or the opportunity that reading it in bite-sized chunks can allow for increased reflection and analysis of individual moments (never before have I had such an in-depth discussion on pier glass or riding coats). For all this though, the greatest revelation I found was the experience of reading a book in stages as a community – it was not a discussion of preconceived ideas formed by reading the whole book on our own, but rather a developing conversation as our own ideas shifted with each weekly instalment.

It is this peripheral, transcendental material that is lacking from our understanding of contemporary reactions to Dickens; that weekly or monthly conversation between friends as they anticipated the next calamity to befall Pickwick or Oliver, that would not only enhance their appreciation of the book but indeed become as much a part of the experience as the text itself, and you can begin to appreciate how it is that American readers crowded the ports waiting for news of Little Nell. To read Dickens a bit at a time is to let the book into the rhythm of your life, to see your own reactions influenced by events happening in between, whether that be a night at the cinema watching The Dark Knight Rises or the Olympic mania influencing the blogger’s use of symbolism and metaphor.

But what strikes me most is how regularly we would engage in distinctly unacademic chatter (for which I hold my fair share of responsibilty); thus analysis of theme, tone or language would just as often give way to heated debates of who we were rooting for and who was really starting to grate on our nerves, and while these moments were a departure from the more objective stance we ought to take, they were great fun,and in that sense, perhaps, more in the spirit of Dickens.

Hazel Mackenzie

Reading the novel week by week highlighted the difference between appreciating the serial nature of the Victorian novel as a historical fact and really experiencing it for myself, and finally blew that whole Dickens-as-Eastenders chestnut right out of the water. Following conventional wisdom, I had assumed the serial nature of the venture would heighten anticipation and that the novel itself, Dickens being the serial supremo, would play upon that. I expected to be teased by the plot, but also that a number helpful reminders and hints would be dropped along the way. Not at all. There are no previously-ons here, few cliffhangers and frequently abrupt changes of place and time. Minor characters that have gone unseen for months suddenly reappear with little or no backwards glance to their previous appearance. One instalment you are in England, the next in France with a completely new set of characters, and so it goes on for some time (Lucy, as our no-spoilers policy revealed, doesn’t even emerge as ‘Lucy’ for quite some time). One might argue that this adds to the suspense but in practice it meant that the focus shifted from ‘what is going to happen next?’ or ‘even what is all this about?’ and ‘how do the strands connect?’ to the moment in hand. Dickens’s genius for the illuminating detail emerged full force through this method of reading, his gift for tableaux and character observation taking prime place. At times reading an instalment felt akin to reading a modern short story, as the narrative structured itself around specific significant moments and situations, the pleasure of which, for me at least, was mostly divorced from any sense of linear progression. My sense of the why and wherefore of the Victorian reader, and that amorphous creature’s appetites and expectations was thus quite dramatically shifted.

John Drew

The blog was, surely, a very worthwhile experiment in reviving the kind of intense discussions that we know must have taken place in all kinds of social contexts, concerning Victorian novels as they were serialized. To borrow the sub-title of Patrick Leary’s fine 2010 study The Punch Brotherhood, the blog seemed to offer the potential of restoring to life the ’table talk and print culture in mid-Victorian London’ that was lost as soon as it was uttered. As a contributor, I have two abiding recollections of the experience. The first is that I found it difficult to decide on a writing tone that sounded sufficiently spontaneous, and the very fact that I was conscious of the difficulty, made it impossible not to be artificial. Most of my recent writing experience is of academic composition, so I have to confess I affected a different style–an uncomfortable mixture of journalese and badinage I would say–to write ‘a piece,’ rather than communicating interactively with the other bloggers, and helping maintain a conversation. That might not wholly invalidate the points I had to make, but it complicates the notion of the blog as a whole being some kind of pellucid transcript of lost table talk.

My second recollection is entirely discrete from the blog, so perhaps irrelevant, but I’d like to mention it all the same. Throughout the 31 weeks of the re-serialization, I was supervising postgraduate research (now successfully concluded) into  the reception of A Tale of Two Cities. Almost every week, I was becoming aware of new material–unnoticed reviews of the serial parts of the novel in the British, American, Australian press; evidence of well over a hundred translations into European languages; sales figures for the novel indicating it outsells almost every other Dickens title in North America; download statistics showing the novel as the most popular work in e-text format. A rhetorical question in the final report–which I paraphrase of course–sticks in my mind: ‘does this kind of evidence constitute a challenge to traditional high-end methods of generating critical positions’? Perhaps yes, was the anticipated answer. The parallel evidence of the reception afforded to the novel in serial form in 2012 by the ATOTC blog begs a similar question.

Joanne Shattock

Reading and contributing to the TOTC blog over a seven month period made me understand for the first time the dynamics and the challenge of serial publication.  Quite simply it taught me to read a Dickens novel differently.  I had thought I grasped the significance of serialization by noting the divisions into monthly or weekly parts helpfully provided in modern paper back editions. I knew about the pressures, positive and negative, that the mode of production exerted on Dickens. But I had never read the individual parts discretely, in a regular, disciplined way.  I was helped, with A Tale of Two Cities, by the fact that although I had read it several times I did not ‘know’ it in the way I do for example Oliver Twist or Great Expectations, or Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Dombey and Son, those perennials on undergraduate and postgraduate syllabuses.

So shaky was my memory of the novel that I didn’t have to feign unfamiliarity much of the time, apart from the beginning and the end. I WAS genuinely caught up in the shifts of authorial sympathy as we were alternately encouraged to admire the inhabitants of Sainte Antoine, and share their palpable sense of grievance, to deplore the grotesque excesses of Monseigneur and his fellow aristocrats, and then gradually to see the darker side of the revolution emerging, and to regret the doomed generation who awaited execution in La Force.

My readerly memory was also caught out by the demands of weekly reading, an experience I was relieved to learn that I shared with fellow bloggers.  I was constantly having to leaf back through earlier instalments to be reminded of where I had first met Jerry Cruncher, how the physical similarities of Carton and Darney were first revealed, or whether we had been told that Miss Pross had a brother. We all gained respect for the mid-Victorian readers who did not own copies of back issues of All the Year Round, or who had had instalments read aloud to them. They obviously possessed far greater powers of retention than their modern counterparts.

The other aspect of the blog that I found most intriguing was trying to work out who my audience was.  I knew I wasn’t writing an academic article, but was I writing for readers who knew Dickens’s novels well, for readers who were interested in this particular novel, for the ‘general reader’ whoever that might be, for those interested in the Victorian period, the Victorian novel, Dickens, novels, history, all of the above? Was the Dickens Bicentenary a factor in the growing number of readers we knew we were attracting?  A couple of months into the process this no longer seemed a concern. The regular bloggers, who were numbered in double figures, began to enjoy the conversation, and to be appreciative of each other’s insights and contributions.

Holly Furneaux

For me the project was a good opportunity to look at the conversations between the serialized novel and the other content of All the Year Round. I set out with the aspiration to read each weekly issue in full. Though I didn’t always manage to sustain this, I was especially interested by the comments that drew out shared concerns across the fiction and journalism, such as invasion fears, discussions of Civil War via the news reporting of the Second Italian War of Independence, and attention to corruptions in the British legal system. By attending to these broader cultural concerns of 1859 we were able to get an insight into the contemporary importance that Dickens’s first readers were able, and encouraged, to attach to this historical novel.

Discussions of rewritings of the novel in films, musicals and fan fiction also spoke to the particular experience of serial reading. In issue one I was surprised to meet Cousin Feenix of Dickens’s Dombey and Son in a piece of Dickens journalism, ‘A Poor Man and his Beer’. This figure, freed from the novel in which he first appeared and casually reintroduced to an audience clearly expected to recognize him, provides a nice embodiment of the way in which characters, particularly those appearing over a long space of time in serialized fiction, take on an imaginative life of their own. Throughout the project I became fascinated in Sydney Carton’s afterlives: at Batman’s grave, at the siege of Mafeking, for First World War troops, on Broadway. I was also pleased to learn of his prominence in slash fiction, and the imaginative investment of contemporary readers in his alternative queer future. These moments felt like points of continuity with those Victorian readers who held Dickens’s characters as personal friends.

What’s Next?

A new blog project! This time we’ll follow Wilkie Collins’s No Name through the installments of All the Year Round from Friday 15 March 2013 (to coincide with the 1862 publication date) and we’ll read our final instalment on the week of 17 January 2014. We’ll follow this sensational tale of illegitimacy, deception, disguise and revenge through its regular short weekly instalments for 45 weeks. Participants can read the instalments in their magazine form via Dickens Journals Online and we’ll share our responses in an online reading group/blog. For more information please see our website, and to sign up to blog please email Holly Furneaux hf35@le.ac.uk All are welcome. We look forward to reading with you.

Having discovered this novel bias, I decided to begin rectifying the problem by revisiting a play that made a great impression on me the first time I encountered it: Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. As well as being guilty of not seeking out enough nineteenth-century drama, I am also always inclined to treat it in a novelly-way when I do, by reading it rather than watching it, and whilst I vividly remember enjoying Ibsen’s work the first time we discussed it in an undergraduate seminar, I only ever encountered it as a text on the page. By a happy coincidence, however, my new resolve to experience A Doll’s House in the theatre perfectly coincided with the revival of the Young Vic’s production from last summer, which was based on a new translation by Simon Stephens, and won two awards for the performance of Hattie Morahan as Nora.

I was a little uncertain at first as to whether the production would work in the modern surroundings of the Young Vic. There are so many grand late-Victorian theatres in central London that I assumed the play would be more ‘authentically’ experienced in one of those: suitably austere surroundings to augment the controversial outcome of the play, which sparked outrage upon its original performance for its supposed representation of an ‘unnatural’ woman who abandons her children. The space at the Young Vic had been chosen for an excellent reason, however: to accommodate a house set up on a revolving stage, which so perfectly communicated the cramped, doll-like nature of Nora’s home that I felt claustrophobic even watching from outside. The door-frames were low, the corridors narrow, the furniture small and characterless; and the constant, dizzying rotation of the set perpetuated Nora’s feeling of being cut off from herself, and trapped in a cycle of ‘play’. This pervasive feeling of ‘inhabiting’ the space of the play meant I found myself utterly absorbed in the unfolding events, and the interval came almost as a surprise: a sudden, 130-year jolt back into the present day.

Whilst the revolving stage is obviously a modern touch, almost everything else in the production is preserved from the original: Simon Stephens’s translation is clean, incisive and utterly faithful to Ibsen, and the costumes and furnishings are authentically Victorian. The famous tarantella scene, in which Nora dances ‘as though [her] life depended on it’ (‘It does,’ she replies),[1] had lost none of its dramatic heft 130 years on, still perfectly encapsulating Nora’s desperate internal struggle, as her wild dancing oscillates between desire and destruction. Similarly, the final exchange between Nora and Torvald (and, of course, that slamming door) was just as powerful, abrupt, and shocking as it was described in contemporary reviews.[2] Even humorous little touches like Nora’s secret stash of sweets remained touching and relevant.

Hattie Morahan and Dominic Rowan in A Doll's House at the Young Vic. Photo by Richard Hubert Smith

The affective power of this preserving emphasis meant that, at the end of the play, I wondered whether Ibsen actually required any ‘updating’ at all. The director of this production, Carrie Cracknall, also produced a short film with writer Nick Payne, which moved Nora (still played by Morahan) to a modern-day setting, as a busy wife, mother and ad executive, struggling to juggle work and home life. It’s a beautifully-shot film, haunting and melancholic, and clearly emphasizes that Nora’s dilemma is just as relevant today. However, whilst I’m usually an advocate of being creative with a text – re-imagining and reworking to throw new and unexpected light on it – in this case, I almost felt that it wasn’t necessary. Experiencing Ibsen’s original on stage almost verbatim, was, I felt, enough to identify the continuing resonance of his ideas; to draw attention to nuances that I hadn’t picked up on just by reading the text; and to make me think about the play in new ways. My theatre companion (a non-Victorianist) agreed: having expected to find the nineteenth-century setting alienating, she instead found herself absorbed to the point where she almost ignored the period details. On the way home we were unable to decide whether this was a quality unique to theatre, to Ibsen, to this particular story, or to none (or all) of the above.

Either way, it was an interesting foray into thinking about late-Victorian theatre, which clearly raised as many thoughts and questions for me as for the first-time reviewers in Copenhagen. The multi-sensory immersion in the text that came from experiencing it on stage has pushed me to think more about my own research on bodies, literature, and the spaces in between, and I’m also determined to continue considering nineteenth-century drama (and poetry) with the same vigour I apply to novels. Now if I can just find someone to help me stage Dickens’s The Village Coquettes…

Emma Curry is a PhD student at Birkbeck College, where she is researching Dickens’s representations of bodies, body parts and fashion accessories. You can follow her on Twitter: @EmmaLCurry

[2] See here for a selection.

Vol. II. Chapter 1. The Throne

Leader: Samatha Briggs

Ruskin’s introduction to the second volume of The Stones of Venice outlines much of his argument about architecture in and travel to Venice. Ruskin approaches the city as a modern traveller offering a glimpse of what it may have been like to see it in its original splendour. Ruskin discusses the importance of memory, romance, and the imagination, the ideals we form about a place and the sense of reality experienced once we visit it.

A PDF copy of this reading can be downloaded here. Please try and use this copy so that we can make use of the page numbers and references.*

How it will work:

Each week a new extract will be uploaded to the site. We ask that you read the extract from that week and then highlight any points of interest, observations or questions you might have. Comments should be made in that week’s comment box. All comments will be released daily, unless deemed unsuitable. You can hashtag comments or reflection at #JVCruskin. Feel free to respond to each other but please be respectful of each other’s points of views. At the end of the week the leader will then provide a summary and concluding remarks of the discussion.

Extract One: ‘The Throne’ (Friday 11^th May- concluding Friday 18^th May) led by Samantha Briggs (University of Exeter)
Extract Two: ‘Modern Education’ (Friday 18th May- concluding 25^th May) led by Jonathan Memel (University of Exeter)
Extract Three: ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (Friday 25th May- concluding 1^st June) led by Samantha Briggs (University of Exeter)

How it will work:

Each week a new extract will be uploaded to the site. We ask that you read the extract from that week and then highlight any points of interest, observations or questions you might have. Comments should be made in that week’s comment box. All comments will be released daily, unless deemed unsuitable. Feel free to respond to each other but please be respectful of each other’s points of views.

This photograph by John and Charles Watkins shows Dickens standing, as though ready to go for a walk.

Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often.  “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1]  This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that.  Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer.  Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his books into being, and to calm the effects of his intense engagement with his characters.”[2]  Walking served Dickens’s body as well as the body of his work, we might say.

Like his photographic image (discussed at greater length in Celebrity Circulation I), Dickens himself circulated far and wide.  Unlike the circulation of his image, however, Dickens saw his own physical mobility in positive terms.  The connection between photography and walking may seem incidental or at best metaphoric–a play on circulation and no more.  Yet the incidence of Dickens’s two visits to the U.S. reveals a more material connection.  In spite of Dickens’s wariness of his photographic image on the one hand, and his desire for walking on the other, these two forms of circulation (and the relative lack thereof) together indicate a national difference in the logic of celebrity.

During his visits to the United States, both Dickens’s movements and his photographic image were more controlled–indeed, restricted.  In 1842, his physical movement around the country was more often choreographed for and in some ways withheld from him.  Even during his less scripted visit of 1867-8, his perambulations were limited due to injury and illness.  The multiplication and circulation of his image was also restricted during his second visit when he granted exclusive photographic rights to the New York studio Gurney and Son.  In the United States, Dickens and his image alike moved differently.  This illuminates a difference not only in the way Dickens was regarded as an author, but in articulations of celebrity in mid-century Britain and the U.S.

Dickens’s walking was a way of releasing excess energy, a way of expressing his feelings of “houselessness” (as he put it in an 1861 essay for The Uncommercial Traveller), and a way of seeing.  Dickens describes nighttime rambles as a product of “a temporary inability to sleep,” a “disorder” for which walking to exhaustion was the best cure.[3]  This restlessness was a matter of mind as well as body–an experience of “houselessness” that Dickens professes to experience as an amateur.

The term “houselessness” may seem ironic, considering the man lived in over 20 rented or purchased homes in Britain during his life.  The number of dwellings grows further still when one takes into account the number of extended stays with friends, such as Wilkie Collins, as well as lengthy visits abroad.  Yet this itinerant changing of addresses shares with houselessness a quality of restlessness, a drive towards motion.

This motion–expressed in Dickens’s frequently solitary walks–was denied him during both of his visits to the United States.  During his first visit, Dickens’s dance card was quite full with visits to social institutions, readings, and public engagements.  His itinerary made him stressed: “‘I have no rest or peace, and am in a perpetual worry,’” he declared.[4]

Dickens, Boston Daily Advertiser, March 1868

Part of the problem was in the way his movements were highly scripted: as Michael Slater writes in his biography of Dickens, the author “told Forster he could do nothing he wanted to do, go nowhere that he wanted to go and see nothing that he wanted to see.”[5]  He was kept in constant motion, but it was not a motion of his own making: “‘everything public, and nothing private…If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude…I am exhausted for want of air.’”[6]  He moved, true, but this movement was restricted and left him in want of private rambles.

During his 1867-8 visit, he took more control over his itinerary.  While Slater writes that “His fierce schedule left him scant time for sight-seeing,” his time was somewhat more his own, which left time for more walks.[7]  As James Fields observes, during the trip “scarcely a day passed, no matter the weather, that he did not accomplish his eight or ten miles.”[8]  Yet his health began deteriorating.  During his visit to New York, his foot hurt him so badly that he could not wear a shoe.

In an effort to boost his spirits, his friends Dolby, Osgood, and Fields helped him plan a “Great International Walking Match.”  Too injured to walk, Dickens oversaw the contest and observed Osgood (representing America) beat Dolby.  Upon his return home to Gads Hill, Dickens’s health improved and his walks resumed.  First by itinerary and then by health, Dickens found his motion restricted during both of his visits to the U.S.

As with his walking, Dickens’s images obeyed a logic of arrested mobility in the United States.  During his 1842 visit, Dickens sat for Francis Alexander’s portrait as well as Henry Dexter’s bust–yet no notable photographic images, despite the fact that daguerreotypy, now in its third year of public practice, was increasingly popular in the States.  Daguerreotype photographers were already bifurcating into two sub-fields in 1840s America: urban studio daguerreotypists and itinerant traveling daguerreotypists.  It does not appear that Dickens was photographed in America until his second visit, when he promised the Gurney studio that it would be the only American studio to record his image during the trip.

Dickens famously distrusted photography, yet somehow found himself compelled to sit for photographic portrait after photographic portrait in Britain.  In America, conversely, his image was more tightly controlled.  This difference–between photographic proliferation and circulation in Britain, and restrictive control in the U.S.–highlights larger issues of mobility in Dickens’s own life, as well as national differences in the expression of celebrity.

Reading Dickens’s walking practices alongside his visit to the U.S. as well as his photographic portraits introduces a contradiction of sorts.  It is perhaps metaphorically ironic that what I am describing as Dickens’s controlled mobility in America coincides with the uncontrolled proliferation of his literary works.  Dickens objected to the “inadequate copyright protection” granted to foreign authors in the U.S.[9]  In practical terms, the absence of adequate copyright protection meant that pirated copies of Dickens’s novels were being reproduced in America and Dickens had no control over their distribution, no financial compensation, and no legal recourse.  While Dickens found himself unable to circulate freely in the U.S., his own literary works were circulating a bit too freely.

In general, Dickens enjoyed walking and did not enjoy sitting for his photographic portrait.  Yet walking in the U.S. was apparently as distasteful for the author as sitting for his portrait, because in each he was forced to confront an unwelcome expression of celebrity.  According to Meckier, Dickens experienced Americans as “overbearing”; they were willing and able to “desecrate a Briton’s cherished conceptions of proper reserve.”[10]  Not only did they exhibit “Selfishness, crassness, and hoggishness,” particularly offensive were the “liberties that Americans took with Dickens personally.”[11]  American celebrations of celebrity were more intrusive, more confrontational, and more familiar.  More restrictive.

This restrictive American familiarity was an outgrowth, Dickens believed, of “the New World’s democratic postulates.”[12]  This democratic expression of celebrity was paradoxically more restrictive than its British counterpart, in that it arrested the movement of its subject.  But move Dickens must, and impositions on this particular type of circulation were egregious to him.  While all of photography was a restriction, of sorts, of Dickens’s control over his mobility, nothing illustrates this restriction more clearly than the Gurney contract.  America, it would seem, wanted to fix Dickens the man and Dickens the image in place–and Dickens himself wanted none of it.

Susan Cook is Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature.  When she is not collecting Victorian photography, she is writing about Victorian literature and visual culture.  Follow Susan @Susan_E_Cook.

[1]  This popular quote has been blogged and reblogged, tweeted and retweeted, and generally spread every which way around the Internet without citation.  For the quote in a published article, at least, see Merrill Noden, “Frisky as the Dickens,” Sports Illustrated (February 15, 1988).

[2] Rosemary Bodenheimer, “Rambling Man,” Boston College Magazine (Fall 2007).

[3] Charles Dickens, “Night Walks,” The Uncommercial Traveller (1861).

[4] qtd. in Michael Slater, Charles Dickens (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), p. 184.

[5] Slater, p. 184.

[6] Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (London: Mandarin, 1994), pp. 202-3.

[7] Slater, p. 578.

[8] Slater, p. 582.

[9] Jerome Meckier, “Dickens Discovers America, Dickens Discovers Dickens: The First Visit Reconsidered,” Modern Language Review 79.2 (1984), 266-77 (p.267).

[10] Meckier, p. 268.

[11] Meckier, p. 268-9.

[12] Meckier, p.269.

Related JVC Articles:

Kathryn Hughes’ “Dickens World and Dickens’s World.” JVC 15.3 (2010)

Simon Morgan’s “Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England.”

JVC 17.2 (2012)

Juliet John’s “‘A body without a head’: The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens’s American Notes (1842).” JVC 12.2 (2007)

Alfred Russel Wallace 1862

Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero, a documentary about Alfred Russel Wallace in the year that marks the centenary of his death (BBC 2, April 21^st and 28^th) proved to be even more than the sum of its parts, which were considerable. Bill Bailey’s knowledge about Wallace and about Indonesia, and his wittily expressed enthusiasm and admiration, were supported by excellent camera-work, illuminating use of documents from the archive at the Natural History Museum, and a dazzling cast of supporting characters, human and animal. Among the latter group were orang-utans, frogs, including a slightly reluctant flying frog; a grumpy-looking cuscus; a ruthless tarsier; countless beetles and butterflies; and the dazzling standard wing bird of paradise, named after Wallace. Here was a guide whose words on Wallace – his sense of adventure, discovery and delight in the natural world – could equally be applied to himself. Bailey travelled in the footsteps or the wake of his hero, up rivers, across straits, through jungle paths, wading barefoot through streams, and eating the occasional fricassee of fruit bat, while a battered trunk, an image of Wallace’s eight year journey, provided continuity, a constant reminder of the sheer logistical feat accomplished by Wallace, as he transported all the necessary equipment for a major collecting expedition from Singapore to Borneo, the Spice Islands and New Guinea, and back again. He criss-crossed the Malay Archipelago with astonishing energy, collecting, observing, and writing scientific papers, and moving from the comparatively well-known and accessible areas to remote islands involving hazardous sea-voyages.

The programme was very clearly structured. Part 1 introduced Wallace and his first years of field-work, spent largely in Sarawak on the island of Borneo, a period during which he collected astonishing quantities of insects, encountered orang-utans which he was able to study as well as to shoot (he was financing his journey by selling what he collected), and also found time to write his first important theoretical paper, ‘On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species’ (published September 1855 in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. In this he argued that all species evolved from earlier forms. He despatched it for publication in London, and then travelled eastwards, crossing from Bali to Lombok, and from there to Sulawesi (formerly Celebes). Having crossed the twenty odd miles strait to Lombok, he found himself startlingly in a new world of fauna. This abrupt change was an epiphanic moment. He had crossed an invisible frontier, represented geographically by deep water, and had moved from, he realised, an island populated by essentially Asian animals, to a distinctive Australian fauna. He had, in fact, discovered the line now labelled by his name, and worked out the broad geographical and geological causes before anyone knew about tectonic plates.

Part 2 took up the story as Wallace landed on Sulawesi, delighting in the strange animal forms he found there, a moment memorably captured in the film when a black, tail-less macaque nuzzled Bill Bailey as he sat cross-legged on the beach. This second episode was dominated by three themes: Wallace’s engagement with the questions revolving around species, their variation and distribution; his quest to collect birds of paradise, which would, once sold, fund the next stages of his expedition; and the great breakthrough on the mechanism of evolution. Suffering from malaria, he suddenly recollected Malthus’s doctrine as to why some lived, and some died, and realised that the superior or best-fitted forms would necessarily survive. Wallace wrote out his theory, added a covering letter, and sent it to Darwin by Dutch mail-boat (we saw Bill Bailey popping an envelope into a Ternate mail-box).

This is where the story becomes either very complicated, or extremely simple. The outcome is well-known: a joint paper read to the Linnean society on July 1^st, 1858, sponsored by Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, featuring two pieces of text by Darwin

Wallace Portraiy at the Natural History Museum with Bill Bailey looking on

intended for other purposes, followed by Wallace’s eloquent exposition. Darwin was not present, kept at home by family illness and bereavement; Wallace was not consulted, perhaps inevitably. Darwin’s name and texts came first, as he had conceived his own theory years before; Wallace followed. The point of view followed by the programme was trenchantly expressed. Lyell and Hooker ‘cooked up’ a plan, ‘a contrivance’; ‘Wallace was robbed’. But now, triumphantly, a full-length portrait of a benign-looking Wallace was unveiled at the Natural History Museum, hanging proudly beside the statue of Darwin, which has dominated the main hall in recent years.

And quite right too. Wallace has been undervalued for far too long, though at his death he had an international reputation, and certainly in the field of biogeography he has never been eclipsed. Bill Bailey’s advocacy is part of a process of the recent rediscovery of this extraordinary giant of natural history, and much else besides. Conferences are being held throughout the world in this centenary year, including a two day event organized by the Royal Society on October 21^st and 22^nd, followed by a Wallace day at the Natural History Museum on October 23^rd. This latter event offers an opportunity to appreciate the riches of the Museum’s Wallace collection, including the project to make Wallace’s entire correspondence available on-line. If Thomas Huxley was Darwin’s bull-dog, Dr George Beccaloni, curator of orthopteroid insects at the Museum and the historical consultant for Jungle Hero, is Wallace’s indefatigable champion and equivalent.

Wallace seems to have conceived his theory of evolution by means of natural selection – as expressed in his Ternate paper – entirely independently, a brilliant concept that staggered Darwin when he first read it. The context, of course, he shared with many others. Rebecca Stott’s thought-provoking book Darwin’s Ghosts traces the varied proponents of evolution from Aristotle to Wallace. Wallace himself was inspired by Vestiges (1844), and in his preliminary Sarawak paper uses the example of the Galapagos islands to explain why separate islands each had their peculiar species ‘either on the supposition that the same original emigration peopled the whole of the islands with the same species from which differently modified prototypes were created, or that the islands were successively peopled from each other, but that new species have been created in each on the plan of the pre-existing ones’. (Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 16 (2^nd ser.),184-196) (Wallace was not, of course, arguing for creation by God, but by natural laws.) This example seems clearly to derive from Wallace’s reading of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839, revised editions 1845). Among those who did read and understand the implications of Wallace’s Sarawak paper was his co-explorer in the Amazon, Henry Walter Bates. Bates still on the other side of the world, wrote to Wallace in Makassar: ‘I was startled at first to see you already ripe for the enunciation of the theory….The idea is like truth itself, so simple and obvious that those who read and understand it will be struck by its simplicity, and yet it is perfectly original.’ He added, perhaps with an implied though mild rebuke: ‘The theory I quite assent to, and, you know, was conceived by me also, but I profess that I could not have propounded it with so much force and completeness.’ (Bates to Wallace, 19 November 1856, Natural History Museum) ‘Conceived by me also’: the search for the origin of species was very much in the minds of both Wallace and Bates when they headed off to the Amazon in 1848; and the botanist Richard Spruce, whose paths crossed with theirs from time to time, also held independent views on the evolution of organic forms, and later reminded Wallace of the fact: ‘If you recollect our conversations at São Gabriel, you will understand that I have never believed in the existence of any permanent limits – generic or specific – in the groups of organic beings’.(Spruce to Wallace, 21 November 1863, Natural History Museum)

Yet the second and essential part of puzzle eluded them. There were others inching their way towards a new understanding of the world, until Darwin, labouring for many years to pile up incontrovertible evidence, and Wallace, inspired by his penetrating observation of the fauna as he made his way across the archipelago, cleared the way by the joint announcement of 1858, followed by On the Origin of Species in 1859. Wallace, unfortunately,was not in a position to write his own book of theory, although, from the entries in his notebooks, he was clearly planning one. The Malay Archipelago (1869), however, dedicated with characteristic generosity to Darwin, may be read as a counterpart to the Origin. Extracts from this magnificent travel book, read at appropriate contexts by Bill Bailey, reminded us of what a lucid and often enthralling writer Wallace was, yet another of his many accomplishments. His humanity and his sense of wonder shine through. Much of the text closely follows his journal entries, made during long and arduous days on what he described as the central and controlling incident of his life, a journey beautifully and appropriately celebrated by this programme.

Peter Raby is a fellow emeritus of Homerton College, Cambridge. He is the  author of Bright Paradise, a study of Victorian scientific travellers, and a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace (Chatto and Windus, and Princeton University Press 2001).

Email: phr21@cam.ac.uk

Related JVC Articles:

Bernstein, Susan D., ‘Ape Anxiety: Sensation Fiction, Evolution, and the Genre Question’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2001) 6:2, pp. 250-271.

Levine, George L., ‘Science and Victorian Literature: A Personal Retrospective’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2007) 12:1, pp.86-96.

O’Connor, Ralph, ‘From the Epic of Earth History to the Evolutionary Epic in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2009) 14:2, pp.207-223.

Watt-Smith, Tiffany, ‘Darwin’s Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2010) 15:1, pp.101-118.

White, Paul., ‘Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2011) 16:2, pp.195-213.

'Chartists fighting with police'. Source: True Stories of the Reign of Queen Victoria by Cornelius Brown (London: Griffith & Farran, 1886).

JVC Online is delighted to have the opportunity to provide our readers with access to a selection of seven of the twenty-two papers that graduate students delivered at a conference specifically aimed at showcasing their research. In the past decade, there has been a welcome growth in the number of symposia that provide specific opportunities for doctoral students to share their work not only with their peers but also with established scholars who can offer supportive feedback. Such events can be of great assistance in the process of professionalization—all the way from developing skills in presenting papers and handling question-and-answer sessions to learning techniques in intervening in urgent critical debate.

On the basis of the impressive papers that the conference organizers have generously shared with us, it is clear that ‘Strange New Today’—which focused on ‘Victorians, Crisis and Response’—was an immense success. As the conference coordinators point out in their introduction, the presentations they have chosen explore the different ways in which Victorian writers addressed the shock of their bewilderingly ‘new’ culture, whether in relation to the crisis of secularization, the legacy of the French Revolution, the horrors of the modern city, the desire to revive a chivalric past, the yearning for utopias, the need to contest the tax on turnpikes, and the perceptible gendering of modern temporalities.

Moreover, these papers touch on topics that connect with our own ‘new’ universe: one in which the early twenty-first century often looks back to the Victorians to understand more about their sense of the world they had left behind and the future that was yet to come. Part of the strong appeal of the Victorian period to our present concerns lies in what we can learn from their struggle to adjust to what they sensed was ’strange’ and ‘new’, on some occasions in the bold form of evolutionary theory, while at other times in the shape of a domestic nation that felt less internally cohesive than ever before. To be sure, the ‘new’ crises that pressed upon them may to some degree appear as ‘old’ ones in our eyes: the loss of Christian faith; the deepening of class antagonisms; the fear of reigniting revolutionary violence; and the rampant expansion of empire. Yet, more than a hundred years after the Victorian epoch officially came to an end, the legacies of each bear heavily upon our ‘today’, since these sources of conflict, if in transformed guises, live with us still. It is little wonder there is such a wealth of thriving graduate research that returns our attention to the reasons why these topics—ones that can seem so familiar in our own time—counted among those that announced to the Victorians that their universe in many ways occupied an unforeseen age.

In bringing these selected proceedings before you, the editors at the Journal of Victorian Culture must emphasize that none of these graduate student papers has gone through the same peer-review procedures that we apply to all articles that scholars kindly submit to the published journal. Assuredly, we have prepared these papers in line with the style guide we use for JVC.  And we have negotiated editorial changes with the conference organizers. But, we must insist, these papers do not count as peer-reviewed publications. In every way, this is just how it should be. These much-appreciated samples of research are graduate-level items that form parts of works-in-progress that will eventually develop into peer-reviewed scholarship. We remain grateful to Ben Carver, Jude Piesse, Rebecca Welshman, Will Abberley, Hannah Lewis-Bill, and Andrew Griffiths for taking such care in selecting and editing these seven essays, which give a clear indication of where current inquiries into Victorian culture are heading from a generation-in-training that will soon be poised to join the scholarly profession. Our thanks go to you.

Joseph Bristow
University of California, Los Angeles
jbristow@humnet.ucla.edu

• Conference Organizers, Introduction to ‘Strange New Today’
• Mildrid Bjerke, ‘Matthew Arnold’s Culture Cure’ and the Development of the Literature Study Guide’
• Sally Dugan, ‘Mrs Gaskell, ‘My Lady Ludlow’ (1858): The Guillotine viewed from the Sofa; or, Fictions of the French Revolution as therapy’
• Christina Lake, ‘Darwin Among the Utopians: Evolution of the Coming Race’
• Ben Moore, ‘Gaskell, Engels and the ‘Shock City’: Two Responses to Industrial Manchester in the 1840s’
• Maria Peker, ‘The Crisis of Time: Time-Gendering in Victorian England’
• Gabriel Schenk, ‘The Eglinton Tournament and the Propagation of Chivalry’
• Rita Singer, ‘Rebellious Children of Wales: Amy Dillwyn and the Sons and Daughters of Rebecca’

Mildrid Bjerke is a doctoral candidate in the department of English and Related Literature at the University of York Her research concerns the development of the genre of the literature study guide and its relation to literary criticism and education.  She has previously studied literature, aesthetics, art history and philosophy at Oslo, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, and Warwick.

Dr Sally Dugan is the author of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (Forthcoming, Ashgate, November 2012). She has written popular books on 19^th-century culture and has taught at Birkbeck, Middlesex and Oxford Brookes Universities. Her research interests are in nineteenth and early twentieth-century print culture, fictional representations of the French Revolution, nationalism and the ‘translation’ of popular fiction across different media.

She is currently a visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, where she is working on a study of middlebrow writers on the Riviera.

Christina Lake is in the third year of a part-time PhD on the subject of eugenics in utopian fiction. She also has a full-time job as an academic librarian and is an associate of the Higher Education Academy.

Ben Moore is a PhD candidate in the department of English, American Studies and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. His thesis, due for completion in late 2013, draws on the work of Walter Benjamin to explore architecture and the city in the works of Gaskell, Dickens and Zola. His article, ‘“When I went to Lunnon town sirs”: Transformation and the Threshold in the Dickensian City’, is due to be published in the December issue of Dickens Quarterly.

Maria Peker is a PhD student in her final year in the Department of English at the University of Hamburg, Germany. In her dissertation she looks at the figure of “the woman with a past” in the Victorian novel. She reads this character as opening new possibilities of speaking about female fallenness in the 19th century Britain. Contrary to the familiar narrative of the fall as putting an end to a woman’s story, the woman with a past uses her sexual experience for modelling her life trajectory after the masculine pattern of a self-made man. Maria is particularly interested in the works of Trollope and Hardy, as well as the genre of sensation novels.

Gabriel Schenk is in his third year of doctoral research at Pembroke College, Oxford; he is writing on King Arthur as a literary and cultural ‘type’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some more of his work can be seen here.

Rita Singer is a lecturer in the department for British Studies at Leipzig University where she teaches BA and MA courses in British Literatures and Cultural Studies. She has just finished writing her PhD thesis with the title ‘Re-inventing the Gwerin: Anglo-Welsh Identities in Fiction and Non-Fiction, 1847-1914’. Her research primarily involves, but is not limited to Welsh Writing in English, Victorian Britain and Film Studies.

Phrenology model

In March I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at the British Psychological Society’s History and Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) Conference at the University of Surrey. This session was convened by Gregory Tate (Surrey), and included four papers: ‘Definitions of sanity and insanity in sensation novels by Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’ by Helena Ifill (Sheffield), ‘Diagnosis and mental trauma in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’ by Alexandra Lewis (Aberdeen), ‘The self-diagnosis of Sydney Carton’ by Serena Trowbridge (Birmingham City) and ‘Pathology, criminality, and art in the writings of Oscar Wilde’ by Nazia Parveen (Leicester).

The HPP conference programme demonstrated a wide variety of responses to the history of psychology, from examinations of pioneers of psychological practice to reactions to the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, which attempts to classify standard psychiatric illnesses, for use by practitioners). Our panel was unusual in its focus not only on historic approaches to psychology but to their uses in the Victorian novel. Though each of the four speakers offered a very different approach, I think that between us we provided a fascinating snapshot of the differing ways in which nineteenth century writers responded to contemporary psychological and scientific debates.

Helena’s paper set the scene effectively for the panel, by examining how authors such as Braddon and Collins drew on reports in the popular press concerning madness and asylums in their sensation fiction, as well as contemporary doubts concerning diagnosis. Non-medical periodicals were full of articles about the symptoms, causes and treatment of insanity, as well as accounts of insane criminals and their trials. The paper showed how Braddon’s and Collins’ depictions of insanity would have been easily recognisable to Victorian readers of these periodicals. In part this was a way of providing an explanation for the extreme behaviour of their characters and adding shock value to their fiction. However, whilst they use the notion of insanity to create drama and sensation in their fiction, they also allude to controversial contemporary concerns: questions of medical authority, hereditary taints and the pressures of modern life are all explored in their works. By engaging with these issues, the paper argued, their novels entertain whilst both perpetuating and questioning popular conceptions of insanity.

Alexandra continued this theme by considering Charlotte Brontë’s interest in medicine and psychology, and the various and subtle ways in which this is manifested in Villette. Her paper referenced a range of nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical texts with which Brontë was familiar, and noted that diseases of both body and mind, and the manner in which the role of the doctor came to overtake that of the priest in early to mid-nineteenth-century England, were central concerns in the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Drawing in part on her forthcoming chapter in Picturing Women’s Health (Pickering & Chatto), Alexandra’s conference paper explored the intersection between diagnosis, trauma and narrative, investigating Brontë’s use of the perspective of both medical practitioner and, more centrally, patient, to consider areas of human psychology thought to be inexpressible and, at the time, perhaps, undiagnosable: trauma and unquiet memory.

A Tale of Two Cities, illustration by John McLenan, Sydney Carton and Lucie in the quiet house in Soho. 1859.

The issue of diagnosis of mental illness was picked up again in my paper on Sydney Carton, in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It’s well-known that Dickens was interested in the treatment and medicalization of mental illness, most clearly represented in this novel by Dr Manette, but Carton also offers an interesting case give his self-diagnosed apathy and wasting of his life. Reasons for his attitude are hidden within the text, including in his doubled status with Charles Darnay, but my paper focused on how we might diagnose Carton by considering him as the opposite of Samuel Smiles’s ‘men of energy and courage’ whom he commends in Self-Help. My paper also asked why we might try to diagnose literary characters, concluding that this is both helpful in terms of examining socio-historical context and learning more about historical approaches to medicine, but that in many ways this is a very complicated approach, since we can’t help but filter our readings through our own cultural positions. Finally, of course, one sometimes has to remind oneself that these characters are fictional, and ultimately are plot devices, part of a textual strategy on the author’s part, albeit one which aims to create rounded and psychologically-believable characters.

Finally, Nazia concluded our symposium by examining the medicalization of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century, and Wilde’s response to this. Present day audiences do not often hear about Wilde’s response to critics who labelled him ‘diseased’, ‘sickly’ and ‘degenerate’. Thirteen years before Wilde would be charged with crimes of ‘gross indecency’ under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, he authored a piece entitled ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study’ about Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, who was a poet, painter, and ‘dilettante of all things beautiful’. He was eventually imprisoned for fraud and transported to Australia. Wainwright is also believed to have poisoned and killed his uncle, mother-in-law and sister-in-law, for monetary gain, all of who purportedly exhibited similar poisoning symptoms before death. However, this last claim is unverifiable and has led many biographers, including Wilde, to sensationalise and fictionalise Wainwright’s life. Contrary to what readers might expect from the essay, Wilde lingers over Wainwright’s aesthetic preferences and describes his beautiful possessions such as his ‘trays of Tassie’s gems’, filigree worked tea-pots and book engravings. Wilde passes over details relating to Wainwright’s victims emphasising the need to judge the artist and his work through a sort of ‘disinterested curiosity’, as demonstrated in the realm of science. For Wilde, ‘art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval’. Many critics agree that ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison: A Study’, is a guilty confession of Wilde’s own duplicitous life as a married man engaging in same sex acts. This paper argued that Wilde, who had read Darwin, Huxley and Tyndall, offered an evolutionary context in which to understand his own ‘sin’, over a hundred years before ‘homosexuality’ would be accepted as a biological fact.

The panel gave rise to some interesting discussion on the ways in which novels innovate as well as respond in the area of science. Though our symposium was, I think, a departure for the HPP conference, I think that those who attended found it interesting to hear a different approach to psychological reading. Throughout the conference, many papers drew on cultural theorists immediately familiar to literary scholars – including Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, and Deleuze and Guattari – to underpin their examinations of ideas from the history of psychology. These shared theoretical frameworks, and the persistent focus throughout the conference on careful linguistic analysis of psychological texts, suggested some surprising connections between the history of psychology and literary study. Our panel, though, brought something new to the conference in its focus on narrative, and specifically on how the narrative structures of fictional writing can be seen to reshape and inform the concerns of Victorian psychology (and, by extension, of psychological theories today).

If you are interested in the history of psychology, you may be interested by the BPS’s Origins website, which contains some information about the history and development of psychology as a discipline and a diagnostic tool.

Many thanks to Alexandra Lewis, Helena Ifill, Nazia Parveen and Gregory Tate for their input into this report.

Related JVC articles

Incongruous Compounds: Re-reading Jekyll and Hyde and Late-Victorian Psychology

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

Serena Trowbridge is Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Research interests include Victorian poetry and novels; nineteenth century cultures of faith; Pre-Raphaelitism and Gothic. She blogs at Culture and Anarchy and tweets @serena_t.

Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Urban Multiplicity (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Literature), by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, illustrated, £70 (hardback), xx + 251 pages, ISBN 978-0-7486-4040-9

Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series), by Valerie Purton, London: Anthem, 2012, £60 (hardback), xxvii + 190 pages, ISBN 978-0-85728-418-1

Dickens and the Artists, edited by Mark Bills; with contributions by Pat Hardy, Leonée Ormond, Nicholas Penny, and Hilary Underwood, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, illustrated, $55/£25 (hardback), xi + 188 pages, ISBN 978-0-300-17602-5. Accompanies an exhibition at the Watts Gallery, Surrey from June 19 – October 28, 2012

The 2012 Dickens Bicentenary saw the publication of several new considerations of Charles Dickens’s life and writing, as the anniversary year attracted attention inside and outside the academy. One of the most unusual and thought-provoking of these offerings is Julian Wolfreys’s new book Dickens’s London, subtitled Perception, Subjectivity and Urban Multiplicity. Wolfreys revisits some of his interests from his earlier work, Writing London, but here the focus is firmly on Dickens.[i] However, Wolfreys’s study is as much interested in the process of reading (or ‘reading/writing’, as Wolfreys puts it) as it is in Dickens’s representations of London.

Dickens's London

In this compellingly complex book, Wolfreys brings phenomenological theory to bear on close textual criticism. He analyses how reading works for and on the reader, arguing that every act of writing is an act of reading, of interpretation. Wolfreys is interested in how reading works for the modern subject, and how readers and writers interpret the modern urban scene. Wolfreys argues that, in Dickens, the narrating subject’s ‘writing’, or account, of an encounter with the interiors and exteriors of London mirrors ‘the reading subject’s own continuous striving’ to fit fragmented urban modernity ‘into a pattern’ (230). The act of writing about a city is an act of piecing-together fragments of facts, memories, and perceptions into a reading, which ‘re-presents’ the subjective experience of place. This, for Wolfreys, is like the experience of the Dickens reader, who must search for connections amongst fragments (230). To the imagined objection that ‘this is true of any reading’, Wolfreys declares that, essentially, Dickens got there first: in Dickens’s descriptions of London, ‘the narrative mechanism meets the demands of reading the city, and does so through a phenomenological mode of perception’. Wolfreys’s Dickens is ‘a phenomenologist of the city, avant la lettre’ (230-1), a proto-modernist, who does naturally what Wolfgang Iser theorised in the 1970s when writing about modernist fiction.[ii] For Wolfreys, Dickens is the archetypal example of how reading/writing takes substantial ‘things’ and turns them into insubstantial ‘phenomena’.

Wolfreys’s interest in the process of reading emerges in the structure of the book itself. He presents his material in a way which asks us to reflect on the structure of an academic book, on how such books function, and on the ways in which we use them.  There are two different contents lists provided, each headed in a different font. Instead of conventional chapters, Wolfreys provides a critical commentary on long extracts from Dickens’s novels and journalism which describe different areas of London. These are arranged thematically according to the alphabet, from ‘Arrivals (and Returns)’ to ‘X Marks the Spot’; we never arrive at Z, as ‘Dickens’s London…never reaches an end’ (xx). Some extracts are provided without commentary, for the reader to consider for themselves in the light of Wolfreys’s other interpretations and discussions throughout the book. There is no ‘introduction’, as such, although the reader in referred to the essay at the end, entitled ‘Dickens, our Contemporary’, in lieu of an introduction. This leads to some oddities, as at one point the essay is written as if it comes after the extracts (231), and at another point it seems to assume it is being read before them (230). I would recommend that readers do, in fact, turn to the final essay first, as not only does it helps to orientate the reader within the unusual structure, but key terms used by Wolfreys – like the ‘Dickens-machine’ – are not clarified without it. What Wolfreys achieves, however, is to make the reader think about how academic books are constructed, so that the standard structure with which we are so familiar seems suddenly less self-evident.

According to Wolfreys, old maps and photographs cannot help us to recapture ‘Dickens’s London’, because the past was never ‘there’ in a straightforward, unmediated way (222). Wolfreys takes issue with the kinds of literary geography deployed by Jeremy Tambling’s Going Astray: Dickens and London.[iii] Literary tourism, for Wolfreys, represents a flawed attempt to recapture Dickens’s perception of London, when that perception, and the perception of his narrating subjects, was filtered through memory, interpretation, and phenomenological experience. Literary geography is therefore a ‘misunderstanding’ of the process of writing, and denies the true experience of reading. Wolfreys is critical of what he calls Tambling’s ‘biographical-historical reading’ of Dickens’s London, stating that ‘problems can arise if one treats the subject’s encounter with the urban space in straightforward historical or contextual terms, seeking in the process to relate fictive or imaginary vision to that which is real, historically speaking’ (12). I would suggest that there is nothing ‘straightforward’ about such contextual readings of literature, including Tambling’s, most of which are fully aware of the ways in which ‘fiction frames and so deconstructs reality… rather than the “real” thing being the ground for a mimetically or empirically slavish representation’ (35), but Wolfreys sets up a debate that is worth having. However, I wonder then why Wolfreys illustrates his book with images of modern and nineteenth-century London, as Tambling does? Wolfreys’s dense prose means that the reader is made to engage with the text and puzzle it out at every step: this is not a book to read for the first time in a snatched moment or without full concentration. The rewards for spending time on it, however, are great; this is a very striking book that could only be written by an experienced critic.

Book Cover

Valerie Purton’s Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb is also interested in reading, but here the focus is on the favourite authors and dramatists who influenced Dickens’s own fiction. Purton’s book is more carefully conventional in structure than Wolfreys’s, but her declaration that ‘we now need to rehabilitate the adjective “sentimental” as a useful critical concept, rather than a casual term of condemnation or dismissal’ (xiv) is one of striking critical conviction. Purton presents sentimentalism as one of many rhetorical discourses available to a writer, and points out that critics who have dismissed Dickens as ‘sentimental’ were not solving critical questions, but raising new ones (xiii). Purton’s question is a straightforward one: how might the rehabilitation of sentimentalism as worthy of serious critical attention change our reading of Dickens in particular, but also Victorian culture more broadly (xix)? Purton invites us to consider the afterlife of sentimentalism in contemporary culture, a question of topical interest given reports of cinema audiences weeping happily at Les Miserables.

Purton begins by establishing Dickens as ‘a man of his time, part of a rich sentimental tradition’ (10). In chapter one she traces this tradition as far back as the medieval period and through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, before presenting a selection of non-fictional eighteenth-century texts which developed what Purton calls the ‘sentimentalist tradition’. Following on from Wolfgang Herrlinger in the 1980s, and Isobel Armstrong on emotion in Victorian poetry criticism, Purton adopts a functionalist, rather than an etymological approach.[iv] Purton argues that Dickens divides sentimentalism from intellect, or ‘heart’ from ‘head’, ‘feeling’ from ‘thinking’ (or scheming) characters, and the sentimentalist from the comic mode. She draws a distinction between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sentimentalist modes: the former is concerned with public benevolence, while the latter with the evocation of an intense emotional response, released through the ‘sentimentalist melting’ into tears (97).

Purton moves on to eighteenth-century novels and drama in chapters two and three. For Purton, Dickens’s childhood reading did not influence his style in straightforward ways: rather, what she calls Dickens’s ‘misreading’ of his eighteenth-century favourites made his own work very different from theirs. Purton shows convincingly how Fielding, Sterne and Richardson had access to both sentimental and comedic registers, and could switch between them and play them off one against the other. Dickens’s strength, on the other hand, lies (for Purton) in the way he separates the humourous and sentimental registers and then works to keep them apart by intensifying the emotions around value words (42). Purton gives the example of the description of “Dear, gentle, patient, noble, Nell”, a piling-up of adjectives which works, not through the differentiation of their separate meanings, but through a cumulative effect, which appeals to the heart and not the head. Purton continues this argument into chapter three, which tackles drama by Goldsmith and Sheridan (67). Purton is excellent on the workings of influence at the level of language, and her close reading reveals interesting connections across the different periods. Despite Purton’s excellent plot summaries, these chapters could have benefitted from a timeline of key texts and significant dates, for the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century specialist who has distant undergraduate memories of the other century. I also wondered if Purton could have made more of the other non-fiction influences on sentimentalism which she lists in the introduction?

Her suggestion in chapter four that ‘sentimentalist nostalgia’ could provide an explanation for moments of the uncanny in Dickens is interesting, and worth further exploration (71). This excellent chapter’s focus, however, is on ‘Dickens’s experience of assimilating sentimental popular culture by acting in it’, particularly in The Frozen Deep. In his amateur dramatics, Purton argues, Dickens developed an emotional, yet public link with his audience and tried on the role of the dandy and dilettante within the safe confines of the Victorian sentimentalist mode. Here, Purton discusses usefully the erotic strand of Victorian sentimentalism, where sexuality was encoded as ‘sentimentalist melting’ (90).

The final two chapters turn to Dickens’s fiction, which Purton divides chronologically between ‘The Early Novels’ and ‘The Later Novels’. However, Purton does not argue for a linear development from simple to complex sentimentalist effects over the course of Dickens’s career. Instead, she makes a case for the importance of contextual readings of literature, arguing that acontextual readings simplify texts, and that, with Dickens in particular, such readings leave us unable to see the ways in which he is re-working a complex literary tradition. Purton offers a new contribution to discussions about how Dickens established such a close and successful relationship with his implied and actual readers, as she argues that it was a ‘sentimental bond’, created through a complex mixture of public moralising (drawn from sentimentalism’s eighteenth-century roots) and private emotional sympathy (121). Purton made me appreciate The Old Curiousity Shop and Dombey & Son much more (never my favourites among Dickens’s novels), but I would be interested to know Purton’s opinion of Barnaby Rudge, given its eighteenth-century setting. This book has a cool clarity after the heady complexity of Wolfrey’s study, and demonstrates successfully how historical and biographical context, used well, can illuminate literary analysis.

Book Cover

Dickens’s novels established a rich body of contextual material all of their own, exploited by other writers, by dramatists, and, as the essay collection Dickens and the Artists (edited by Mark Bills) shows, by the visual arts. Dickens 2012 saw hundreds of events, talks, and exhibitions, and this book is the result of an exhibition by the Watts Gallery to display ‘the Dickensian vision in Victorian painting’.[v] The essays in this beautifully illustrated volume discuss the ways in which Dickens’s characters and social criticism inspired a wide range of nineteenth-century artists in an engaging approach to art history. Dickens is likely to forever be discussed as ‘a man of his time’, and these three books are recommended to those interested in considering the benefits and perils of approaching any work of art with an eye to its historical context.

Biographical Note

Mary L. Shannon has just completed her PhD on Victorian print culture, entitled ‘Wellington Street, Strand: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street’, at King’s College London. She currently teaches in the English Department there, and also works at King’s Centre for E-Research.

[ii] Iser, Wolfgang. ‘The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach’. New Literary History. On Interpretation: I. 3:2 (Winter 1972): 279-99.

[iii] Tambling, Jeremy. Going Astray: Dickens and London. London: Pearson Education, 2009.

[iv] Armstrong, Isobel. “The Role and Treatment of Emotion in Victorian Criticism of Poetry”. Victorian Periodicals Newsletter 10: 1 (March 1977):  13-16.

[v] Watts Gallery. “Dickens and the Artists”. Web. 21 January 2013 <http://www.wattsgallery.org.uk/exhibition/gallery-exhibition/2011/11/09/dickens-and-artists>.