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Charles Dickens: the Romantic Legacy

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Charles Dickens: the Romantic Legacy ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF ARTS, LAW AND SOCIAL SCIENCES CHARLES DICKENS: THE ROMANTIC LEGACY PETER COOK A thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Anglia Ruskin University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Submitted: January 2017 Acknowledgements Parts of this study were presented at the conferences ‘Literary London: The Victorian Era and Charles Dickens’ at The Oxford and Cambridge Club, London, 15th-17th December 2012; ‘Victorian Age(s): BAVS 2015 Conference’ at Leeds Trinity University, 27th-29th August 2015; and ‘After Dickens’ at the University of York, 2nd-3rd December 2016, and annually at the Cambridge Branch of the Dickens Fellowship, Wolfson College Cambridge, 2012-16. I am most grateful for these opportunities to share my ideas, and for the feedback and encouragement received. I am grateful to staff at Anglia Ruskin University Library, The British Library, and the University of Cambridge Library for their unfailing help and courtesy. My two supervisors, Professor Valerie Purton and Professor John Gardner, have gone well beyond the call of duty in the help, advice, detailed reading of drafts, and general encouragement they have given me. I cannot imagine more expert and effective supervision, and I am deeply grateful. My family, Samya, Nabil and Zeina, have lived with Dickens and the Romantics for the past five years with grace, humour and tolerance – thank you! i Abstract This thesis investigates the relationship between the fiction of Charles Dickens and the work of canonical Romantic Period authors: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Keats, with a view to assessing the influence of these Romantic writers on Dickens’s novels and stories. The reason for the investigation is that, while other influences on Dickens: the eighteenth-century novel, popular culture, melodrama, and the sentimental tradition have been thoroughly investigated recently, the influence of the Romantics has been relatively neglected. Four topics are identified: Childhood, Time, Progress, and Outsiders, which together constitute the main thematic aspects of Dickens’s debt to the Romantics. The use of imagery as a structural, unifying device, rather than a decorative, pictorial addition, is also identified as a significant common feature. Close readings of key Romantic texts, and eight of Dickens’s novels, draw out comparisons and contrasts, indicating the ways in which Dickens appropriated and adapted Romantic tropes and devices. It was found that the influence of the Romantics on Dickens’s fiction is more extensive and important than has previously been recognised. Essentially, Dickens turns to these Romantic tropes and devices to express his responses to the exponential growth of industrial, technological culture, and its effects on personal life and relationships, that was happening as he wrote. The modern society that provoked these complex responses did not exist when the eighteenth-century authors that Dickens loved were writing. The Romantics, on the other hand, witnessed the dawn of this new social order, and experimented with ways of expressing it. Dickens found in them a basis on which to build. These findings demonstrate that the Romantic legacy needs to be taken into account far more seriously in order to arrive at a balanced, fully-rounded understanding of Dickens’s achievement. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................... i Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... ii Abbreviations used in endnotes ...................................................................................................... v Copyright Declaration ................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Literary Context .......................................................................................................................... 2 A Methodology of Influence, Ecology and Things ..................................................................... 6 Critical Context ........................................................................................................................... 9 Method, Design and Structure ................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 1: Childhood .................................................................................................................... 19 Education Debates and Parental Aspirations ............................................................................ 20 David Copperfield: Failing Families ......................................................................................... 29 Childhood to Adulthood ............................................................................................................ 32 Heroes and Villains ................................................................................................................... 34 Romantic Pedigree .................................................................................................................... 37 Tempestuous Images ................................................................................................................. 38 Great Expectations: a Novel without a Hero? .......................................................................... 40 Character and Environment ....................................................................................................... 43 Chapter 2: Time ............................................................................................................................ 55 Watches and Clocks .................................................................................................................. 55 Dombey and Son: Hides and Hearts .......................................................................................... 59 ‘A Watch That’ll Do You Credit’ ............................................................................................. 64 Commonplace Obituaries, Infant Philosophy ........................................................................... 67 A Wandering Princess and a Good Monster ............................................................................. 69 Our Mutual Friend: the Poorest of Mr. Dickens’s Works ........................................................ 73 A Battle Within and Without .................................................................................................... 77 River and Rail............................................................................................................................ 83 iii Chapter 3: Progress ....................................................................................................................... 94 Revolution and Science ............................................................................................................. 94 Bleak House: Mudfog Revisited ............................................................................................... 99 Old School ............................................................................................................................... 105 Love One Another or Die ........................................................................................................ 108 Hard Times outside London .................................................................................................... 112 Strangled in its cradle .............................................................................................................. 114 Stale, flat, and unprofitable ..................................................................................................... 117 Perfect Integrity ....................................................................................................................... 119 Chapter 4: Outsiders ................................................................................................................... 131 Guilt and Isolation ................................................................................................................... 132 Dickens and Master Humphrey ............................................................................................... 139 Unnatural Oppositions............................................................................................................. 142 Lonely Wanderers ................................................................................................................... 144 Little Dorrit: Mind-forged Manacles ...................................................................................... 152 Pillars of Society ..................................................................................................................... 157 Familiar yet Misplaced ............................................................................................................ 159 Nearly Everything of Importance ............................................................................................ 161 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................
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