Dickens After Edited by Emily Bell We Get Back to What Dickens Meant … G.K
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We have a long way to travel before After Dickens Edited by Emily Bell we get back to what Dickens meant … G.K. CHESTERTON, CHARLES DICKENS HE 20th and 21st centuries have continued the quest, so aptly Tdescribed by G.K. Chesterton in 1906, to ‘find’ Charles Dickens and recapture the characteristically Dickensian. From research attempting to classify and categorise the nature of his popularity to a century of film adaptations, Dickens’s legacy encompasses an array of conventional and innovative forms. Dickens After Dickens includes chapters from rising and leading D scholars in the field, offering creative and varied discussion of the continued and evolving influence of Dickens and the nature of his ickens legacy across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Its chapters show the surprising resonances that Dickens has had and continues to have, arguing that the author’s impact can be seen in mainstream cultural phenomena such as HBO’s TV series The Wire and Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, as well as in diverse areas such as Norwegian literature, video games and neo-Victorian fiction. It discusses Dickens as a biographical figure, an intertextual moment, and a medium through which to explore contemporary concerns around gender and representation. The new research represented in this book brings together a range Emily Bell Edited by of methodologies, approaches and sources, offering an accessible and engaging re-evaluation that will be of interest to scholars of Dickens, Victorian fiction, adaptation, and cultural history, and to teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ways in Dickens which we continue to read and be influenced by the author’s work. This collection is edited by Dr Emily Bell (Loughborough University) After with a Foreword by Professor Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London), author of Dickens and Mass Culture. Dr Bell is a board member for the Oxford Dickens series and an editor for the Dickens Letters Project. She also acted as the first Communications Committee Chair of the international Dickens Society, and has published on Dickens, life writing and commemoration. Dickens Dickens After Dickens Edited by Emily Bell Published by White Rose University Press (Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York) University of York, Heslington, York, UK, YO10 5DD https://universitypress.whiterose.ac.uk Dickens After Dickens Text © The Authors, 2020 Chapter 1 draws from content from Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, by Joanna Hofer-Robinson (EUP 2018), and is included with kind permission of Edinburgh University Press. First published 2020 Cover Illustration: Charles Dickens circa 1860s. Wikimedia: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charles_Dickens_circa_1860s.png. Public domain Cover designed by Tom Grady, WRUP ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-912482-20-7 ISBN (PDF): 978-1-912482-21-4 ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-912482-22-1 ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-912482-23-8 DOI (volume): https://doi.org/10.22599/DickensAfterDickens Reuse statement: Apart from exceptions, where specific copyright statements are given, this work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, California, 94042, USA. This licence allows for sharing and adapting any part of the work for personal and non-commercial use, providing author attribution is clearly stated. Example citation: Bell, E. (ed.), 2020. Dickens After Dickens. York: White Rose University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.22599/DickensAfterDickens. CC BY-NC 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ To access this work freely online via the White Rose University Press website, please scan this QR code or visit DOI: https://doi. org/10.22599/DickensAfterDickens. Table of Contents Author biographies v Foreword vii Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London) Introduction 1 Emily Bell (Loughborough University) 1. ‘Once upon a time would not prove to be All-time or even a long time.’ From Sanitary Reform to Cultural Memory: The Case of Jacob’s Island 15 Joanna Hofer-Robinson (University College Cork) 2. Nordic Dickens: Dickensian Resonances in the Work of Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 35 Kathy Rees (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) 3. Dickens and Faulkner: Saving Joe Christmas 57 Katie Bell 4. ‘Awaiting the death blow’: Gendered Violence and Miss Havisham’s Afterlives 83 Claire O’Callaghan (Loughborough University) 5. The Unfinished Picture: The Mystery of Rosa Bud 101 Pete Orford (University of Buckingham) 6. ‘The Thing and Not the Thing’: The Contemporary Dickensian Novel and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013) 117 Rob Jacklosky (College of Mount Saint Vincent) 7. Little Nell in the Cyber Age 141 Francesca Arnavas (University of Tartu) 8. Dickensian Realism in The Wire 159 Laurena Tsudama (Rutgers University) 9. Grand Aspirations: Putting Pip on the Stage Adaptations and Absences 177 Michael Eaton 10. Fictional Dickenses 197 Emily Bell (Loughborough University) 11. Waiting, for Dickens 215 John Bowen (University of York) Index 233 Author biographies Francesca Arnavas, Research Fellow at the University of Tartu, Estonia, working within the research group Narrative, Culture, and Cognition. Emily Bell, Research Associate in Digital Humanities at Loughborough Univer- sity, UK; editor for the Oxford Dickens series and the Dickens Letters Project. Katie Bell, independent researcher with specialism in Dickens, Poe, and American Southern Gothic fiction; PhD from the University of Leicester, UK. John Bowen, Professor of 19th Century Literature, University of York, UK. Michael Eaton, award-winning dramatist who has adapted the works of Dickens for radio, TV and the theatre. Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Lecturer in 19th Century Literature at University College Cork, Ireland. Rob Jacklosky, Professor of English at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, US. Juliet John, Hildred Carlile Chair of English Literature and Head of Humanities, Royal Holloway, University of London; keynote speaker at the ‘After Dickens’ conference, University of York, 2016. vi Author biographies Claire O’Callaghan, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University, UK. Pete Orford, Course Director of the MA in Charles Dickens Studies at the University of Buckingham, UK; Academic Associate of Charles Dickens Museum, London. Kathy Rees, Research Associate at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK. Laurena Tsudama, PhD student in the English Department at Rutgers University, US. Foreword Juliet John, Royal Holloway, University of London I want to suppose a certain SHADOW, which may go into any place … and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty …; a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature. … I want the compiled part of the paper to express the idea of this Shadow’s having been in libraries, and among the books referred to. I want him to loom as a fanciful thing all over London; … an odd, unsub- stantial, whimsical, new thing: a sort of previously unthought-of Power going about … in which people will be perfectly willing to believe, and which is just mysterious and quaint enough to have a sort of charm for their imagination, while it will represent common sense and humanity. I want to express in the title, and in the grasp of the idea to express also, that it is the Thing at everybody’s elbow, and in everybody’s footsteps. At the window, by the fire, in the street, in the house, from infancy to old age, everyone’s inseparable companion. (Charles Dickens, letter to John Forster, 7 October 1849) This is Charles Dickens trying to explain to John Forster what he wanted his own journal to achieve: nothing short of an ‘omnipresent’ influence, intangi- ble yet pervasive, mysterious yet associated with ‘common sense and human- ity’. There is, arguably, no better summary of Dickens’s wildly ambitious vision for his own art and influence than this under-studied passage. Not content with conventional literary influence, Dickens wanted, like the Shadow he describes, to be here, there, and everywhere, yet simultaneously unfathomable, an ‘unthought-of Power’. Could this be why his will famously ‘conjure[d]’ his friends, ‘on no account to make me the subject of any monument, memorial or viii Foreword testimonial whatsoever’ (Forster 859)? As Emily Bell discusses in her Introduc- tion to this volume, the instructions of his will have baffled many; but viewed through the perspective of this earlier letter to Forster, it seems much easier to understand why Dickens would have preferred to figure his influence through the ubiquitous, uncircumscribed, immaterial ‘Power’ of the Shadow, than through the materially and intellectually circumscribed forms of the monu- ment, memorial or testimonial. The ‘After Dickens’ conference held at the University of York in 2016 was one of the best Dickens conferences I have attended in some time, gathering academics from a range of disciplines to reflect on the ‘unthought-of Power’ of Dickens’s legacy. 150 years after his death, Dickens’s influence seems obvious and substantial, but its nature is somehow also intangible. As E. M. Forster said of Mr Pickwick many years ago, he seems to be ‘round’, yet viewed edgeways is ‘not thicker than a gramophone record. But we never get the sideway view’ (79). This verdict on Dickens