Charles Dickens in Context Edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux Frontmatter More Information

Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-69821-5 - Charles Dickens in Context Edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux Frontmatter More information

CHARLES DICKENS IN CONTEXT

Charles Dickens, a man so representative of his age as to have become considered synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. Th is book illuminates the worlds – social, political, economic and artistic – in which Dickens worked. Dickens’s professional life encompassed work as novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. Th is volume off ers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens’s age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Th rough forty-fi ve digestible short chapters written by a leading expert on each topic, a rounded picture emerges of Dickens’s engagement with his time, the infl uence of his works, and the ways he has been read, adapted and reimagined from the nineteenth century to the present.

    was the Hildred Carlile Chair in English at Royal Holloway, University of London.

  is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-1-107-69821-5 - Charles Dickens in Context Edited by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux Frontmatter More information

CHARLES DICKENS IN CONTEXT

  S A L L Y L E D G E R AND H O L L Y F U R N E A U X

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First published 2011 Reprinted 2012 First paperback edition 2013

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Charles Dickens in context / [edited by] Sally Ledger, Holly Furneaux. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-521-88700-7 (hardback) 1. Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870–Criticism and interpretation. I. Ledger, Sally. II. Furneaux, Holly. III. Title. pr4588.c3597 2011 823´.8–dc22 2011006726

isbn 978-0-521-88700-7 Hardback isbn 978-1-107-69821-5 Paperback

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for Sally Ledger in loving memory

C o n t e n t s

List of illustrations page xi N o t e s o n c o n t r i b u t o r s xiii P r e f a c e xix N o t e s o n r e f e r e n c e s xxi

     :                  Th e life of Dickens : before Ellen Ternan  John Bowen  Th e life of Dickens : after Ellen Ternan  John Bowen  D i c k e n s ’ s l i v e s   Michael Slater  Victorian stage adaptations and novel appropriations  Anne Humpherys  Reviewing Dickens in the Victorian periodical press  John Drew  Th e European context  Michael Hollington  M a j o r t w e n t i e t h - c e n t u r y c r i t i c a l r e s p o n s e s   Toru Sasaki  M o d e r n s t a g e a d a p t a t i o n s   Tony Williams  M o d e r n s c r e e n a d a p t a t i o n s   Toru Sasaki

vii

viii Contents   Th e h e r i t a g e i n d u s t r y   Juliet John   N e o - V i c t o r i a n D i c k e n s   C o r a K a p l a n

      :                            P o p u l a r c u l t u r e   Paul Schlicke   Th e rise of celebrity culture  Joss Marsh   Th e newspaper and periodical market  John Drew   A u t h o r s h i p a n d t h e p r o f e s s i o n a l w r i t e r    Florian Schweizer   Th e theatre  Marty Gould   M e l o d r a m a    Juliet John   Th e Bildungsroman    Florian Schweizer   V i s u a l c u l t u r e    Kate Flint   Th e historical novel  Ian Duncan   Th e illustrated novel  Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge   C h r i s t m a s    Sally Ledger   C h i l d h o o d    Holly Furneaux   W o r k    Martin Danahay

Contents ix   E u r o p e    Ruth Livesey   Th e Victorians and America  Ella Dzelzainis   E d u c a t i n g t h e V i c t o r i a n s    Patrick Brantlinger   L o n d o n    Anne Humpherys   P o l i t i c s    Michael Sanders   P o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y    Paul Young   Th e aristocracy  Andrew Sanders   Th e middle classes  Priti Joshi   U r b a n m i g r a t i o n a n d m o b i l i t y    Josephine McDonagh   F i n a n c i a l m a r k e t s a n d t h e b a n k i n g s y s t e m    Francis O’Gorman   E m p i r e s a n d c o l o n i e s    Grace Moore   R a c e    Priti Joshi   C r i m e    Anne Schwan   Th e law  Jan-Melissa Schramm   R e l i g i o n    Emma Mason   S c i e n c e    James Mussell

x Contents   T r a n s p o r t    Jonathan H. Grossman  Illness, disease and social hygiene  Janis McLarren Caldwell   D o m e s t i c i t y    Catherine Waters   S e x u a l i t y    Holly Furneaux   G e n d e r i d e n t i t i e s    C a t h e r i n e W a t e r s

Further reading  I n d e x 

I l l u s t r a t i o n s

Unless otherwise speciﬁ ed, images are by generous courtesy of the Charles Dickens Museum, London.

 Charles Dickens in . From a photograph by Alphonse Maze, Paris, engraved by Edward Stodart. From Frederick G. Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil (London: Sabin, Dexter, –). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington. page   Charles Dickens and his dog, Turk. From a photograph by Mason & Co., engraved by Edward Stodart. From Frederick G. Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil (London: Sabin, Dexter, –). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.   Dickens ‘alone’ on the steps of Gad’s Hill Place. From Frederick G. Kitton, Charles Dickens by Pen and Pencil (London: Sabin, Dexter, –). Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.   William Powell Frith, Dickens , .   ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Instinct Stronger than Training’, Little Dorrit, .   R. W. Buss, Dickens’s Dream , .   George Cattermole, ‘Th e Deathbed of Little Nell’, Master Humphrey’s Clock, –.   Luke Fildes, ‘Jasper’s Sacriﬁ ces’, Th e Mystery of Edwin Drood , .   George Cattermole, ‘Nell and the Old Man Looking Back at London’, Master Humphrey’s Clock , –.   ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Shadow’, Bleak House , . 

xii List of illustrations  ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Tom All Alone’s’, Bleak House, .   ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Mr Pickwick and Sam in the Attorney’s Oﬃ ce’, Pickwick Papers , –.   ‘Phiz’, Hablot Knight Browne, ‘Mr Stryver at Tellson’s Bank’, A Tale of Two Cities , .   John Leech, ‘How to Make Culprits Comfortable; or, Hints for Prison Discipline’, Punch , . Courtesy of University of Leicester Library.   ‘By the Sea’, Tomahawk ,  (August ). From the Nineteenth- Century Serials Edition (), available at www.ncse.ac.uk   Dickens and his daughters in his phaeton. Photograph by Mason & Co., c . .   ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Mr Bob Sawyer’s Mode of Travelling’, Th e Pickwick Papers ,     –  .   

C o n t r i b u t o r s

         i s P r o f e s s o r o f N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y L i t e r a t u r e a t t h e University of York. His publications include Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (), the Penguin edition of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge () and, co-edited with Professor Robert L. Patten, Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (). He served as president of the Dickens Society in , is a member of the faculty of the University of California Dickens Project, and a fellow of the English Association.                   i s J a m e s R u d y P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h ( E m e r i t u s ) at Indiana University. His most recent book is Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies ().                      i s a f o r m e r p h y s i c i a n a n d n o w a n Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot ().              i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t B r o c k U n i v e r s i t y i n C a n a d a . He is the author of A Community of One: Masculine Autobiography and Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain () and Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity (). He has published numerous articles on Victorian culture and edited the collection Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture () with Deborah Denenholz Morse.         i s S e n i o r L e c t u r e r i n E n g l i s h L i t e r a t u r e a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f Buckingham. He has written widely on Dickens and Victorian journalism, including the book Dickens the Journalist (  ), and is currently editing an online edition of Household Words and All the Year Round under Dickens’s editorship (www.djo.org.uk forthcoming ).

xiii

xiv Notes on contributors          i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a , Berkeley. He is the author of Scott’s Shadow: Th e Novel in Romantic Edinburgh () and Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: Th e Gothic, Scott, Dickens (), a co-editor of Scotland and the Borders of Romanticism (), and the editor, most recently, of James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justiﬁ ed Sinner ().               i s B r i t i s h A c a d e m y P o s t d o c t o r a l F e l l o w a n d L e c t u r e r in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Newcastle. She works primarily on the relation between feminism, political economy and literature in the nineteenth century. She is co-editor (with Cora Kaplan) of Harriet Martineau: Authorship, Society and Empire () and (with Ruth Livesey) of Th e American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy, – ().          i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f S o u t h e r n California. She is author of Th e Woman Reader (), Th e Victorians and the Visual Imagination (  ) and Th e Transatlantic Indian –  (), and is currently writing Flash! Photography, Writing, and Surprising Illumination .              i s L e c t u r e r i n V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y of Leicester. She has published widely on Dickens and his contempo- raries and is author of Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (     ) .           i s A s s i s t a n t P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f South Florida. In addition to articles on the Dickens World theme park, he has published on representations of empire on the Victorian stage. He is the author of Nineteenth-Century Th eatre and the Imperial Encounter ().          .    is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. His current project is ‘Th e Transportive Work of Fiction in the Time of Charles Dickens’.                  i s a r e t i r e d p r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h , f o r m e r l y a t t h e University of New South Wales, Sydney, and the Université de Toulouse, Le Mirail, France. He has written books on Dickens, Mansﬁ eld and Grass and edited Charles Dickens: Critical Assessments ().              i s a p r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t L e h m a n C o l l e g e a n d the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has

Notes on contributors xv published on Henry Mayhew, G. W. M. Reynolds, Tennyson, Dickens and on several aspects of the nineteenth-century periodical press. She is currently working on divorce and the nineteenth-century novel, and the penny libraries of popular publisher John Dicks.           i s C h a i r i n V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f Liverpool. She has published widely on Dickens and Victorian culture and is the author of Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture () and Dickens and Mass Culture ().    is Associate Professor of English at the University of Puget Sound. She has published essays on Chadwick, Dickens, the Brontës, Frances Trollope, masculinity and empire. She is currently working on two projects: nineteenth-century periodicals published in India and a book on ‘re-visions’ of Jane Eyre .           i s H o n o r a r y P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t Q u e e n M a r y , University of London and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Southampton. She writes on nineteenth-century literature and culture and on their afterlife. She is the author of Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (     ) .                      i s A s s o c i a t e P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t the University of Victoria, Canada. Her publications have focused on the Victorian periodical press, most recently on the role of illustration in Victorian serial ﬁ ction. She is co-editor (with Lisa Surridge) of the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, – .    was, at the time of her death, Hildred Carlile Chair in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Th e New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (), Henrik Ibsen () and Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (     ) .            i s R e a d e r i n N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y L i t e r a t u r e a n d Th ought at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her publications include Socialism, Sex and the Culture of Aestheticism () and, co- edited with Ella Dzelzainis, Th e American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, – (). She is currently assist- ant editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture .          i s a s e n i o r l e c t u r e r i n t h e D e p a r t m e n t o f E n g l i s h a n d Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She works

xvi Notes on contributors on the relationship between religion and poetry and her most recent book is Th e Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth ().          i s A s s o c i a t e P r o f e s s o r o f V i c t o r i a n S t u d i e s a t I n d i a n a University, Bloomington. She is the author of Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (), Starring Charles Dickens (), numerous essays on Dickens and the nineteenth-century novel and fi lm, and (with her research partner David Francis) essays and lecture performances on, and using, the Victorian magic lantern.                  i s P r o f e s s o r o f N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y L i t e r a t u r e at King’s College, London. Her publications include De Quincey’s Disciplines (), George Eliot () and Child Murder and British Culture – (), and she is co-editor of Charles Dickens , A Tale of Two Cities and the French Revolution ().           t e a c h e s a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f M e l b o u r n e , A u s t r a l i a a n d has published widely on nineteenth-century literature, crime fi ction and neo-Victorianism. She is the author of Dickens and Empire (), which was shortlisted for the  New South Wales Premier’s Award for Literary Scholarship. She is at present working on a study of bush- fi res in nineteenth-century Australian settler culture.             i s L e c t u r e r i n E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f B i r m i n g h a m . He is the author of Science, Time and Space in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press () and one of the editors of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition () (www.ncse.ac.uk).         ’       i s P r o f e s s o r o f V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a t t h e University of Leeds. His recent books include Victorian Literature and Finance () and Th e Cambridge Companion to Victorian Culture ().              i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f D u r h a m and the author of books including Dickens and the Spirit of the Age (  ) and Th e Short Oxford History of English Literature (). He was formerly editor of Th e Dickensian .               i s S e n i o r L e c t u r e r i n V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a t the University of Manchester. He is the author of Th e Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History () and is currently editing Chartist Literary Landmarks for Pickering & Chatto.

Notes on contributors xvii           i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h L i t e r a t u r e a t K y o t o U n i v e r s i t y a n d Vice-President of the Japan Branch of the Dickens Fellowship. He is a frequent contributor to Th e Dickensian and an author of numerous scholarly publications on the Victorian novel (including editions of Hardy, Collins and Braddon). He is currently translating Great Expectations and Bleak House into Japanese.             i s S e n i o r L e c t u r e r ( E m e r i t u s ) i n E n g l i s h a t t h e University of Aberdeen, past president of the Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society of America, author of Dickens and Popular Entertainment () and editor of the Oxford Companion to Dickens () and of the Clarendon Sketches by Boz ( f o r t h c o m i n g ) .    -               i s a f e l l o w a n d D i r e c t o r o f S t u d i e s i n E n g l i s h at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, where she teaches Victorian literature. She is the author of Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Th eology () and Vicarious Experience and Substitutionary Atonement in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (), together with a number of articles on representations of the law in the works of Dickens and Eliot, Victorian satire, and ﬁ rst-person narration. She is also co-editor of Fictions of Knowledge: Fact, Evidence, Doubt ().           i s L e c t u r e r i n E n g l i s h L i t e r a t u r e a t E d i n b u r g h N a p i e r University. She has published on Dickens, gender, crime and prison narratives and is co-author of How to Read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: Th e Birth of the Prison ().                 i s D i r e c t o r o f t h e C h a r l e s D i c k e n s M u s e u m , London, and Project Director of the international Dickens  project. His research focusses on authorship and the status of writers in the nineteenth century, the history of the book and the concept of material culture and celebrity. He has published widely on Dickens and is editor of Charles Dickens: Geheimnisvolle Welten ().              i s E m e r i t u s P r o f e s s o r o f V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a t B i r k b e c k College, University of London, a former editor of Th e Dickensian and also a past president of the Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society of America. Among his publications are Dickens and Women (), An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens (), Douglas Jerrold () and Charles Dickens (). He was also general editor of the Everyman Dickens (–) and editor of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s journalism (–; vol.  co-edited with John Drew).

xviii Notes on contributors             i s P r o f e s s o r o f E n g l i s h a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y o f V i c t o r i a , Canada. She is author of Bleak Houses: Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction (), co-editor (with Richard Nemesvari) of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Aurora Floyd () and co-editor (with Mary Elizabeth Leighton) of the forthcoming Broadview Anthology of Victorian Prose, – . Her recent publications focus on the role of illustration in Victorian serial ﬁ ction.                i s R e a d e r i n V i c t o r i a n S t u d i e s a t t h e U n i v e r s i t y of Kent. She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family () and Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words : Th e Social Life of Goods (). She was president of the Dickens Society in .       was Joint General Secretary of the International Dickens Fellowship from  to  and is currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Buckingham. His main career from  to  was teaching English in secondary schools. He is associate editor of Th e Dickensian .          i s L e c t u r e r i n V i c t o r i a n L i t e r a t u r e a n d C u l t u r e a t t h e University of Exeter. He has published widely on globalisation and imperialism during the Victorian period and his ﬁ rst book, entitled Globalization and the Great Exhibition: Th e Victorian New World Order , appeared in  as part of Palgrave’s Studies in Nineteenth-Century W r i t i n g a n d C u l t u r e .

P r e f a c e

Dickens, a man so imbricated in his age as to be synonymous with it, demands to be read in context. As John Gardiner points out in Th e Victorians: Age in Retrospect (), Dickens ‘is crucial to our sense of the Victorians. Indeed it may even be felt that Dickens in some way is the key to the Victorian age; “Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian”, rather than vice-versa’ (). Th is book seeks to illuminate the contexts – social, political, economic and artistic – in which Dickens worked, as well as the ways he has been read and rewritten from the nineteenth century to the present. Described by James Eli Adams in A History of Victorian Literature () as ‘the single most important literary career of the Victorian era’ (), Dickens’s professional life encompassed work as novelist, journalist, editor, public reader and passionate advocate of social reform. Th is volume off ers a detailed treatment of Dickens in each of these roles, exploring the central features of Dickens’s age, work and legacy, and uncovering sometimes surprising faces of the man and of the range of Dickens industries. Dickens felt himself to be incomplete without the context of his audi- ence, what in a letter to F. M. Evans dated  March  he famously called ‘the personal (I may almost say aff ectionate) relations which subsist between me and the public’ (Letters ,  , ). He aspired through a career of nearly forty years ‘to live’, as he put it in the manifesto to Household Words , ‘in the Household aff ections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts, of our readers. We hope to be the comrade and friend of many thousands of people, of both sexes, and of all ages and conditions, on whose faces we may never look’ ( March ). Th is public life continues as readers, adaptors and a lively heritage industry con- tinue to remake Dickens, with an energy undiminished as we approach the bicentenary of his birth.

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xx Preface Th e ﬁ rst section of this book addresses Dickens’s ‘Life and Afterlife’, whilst a second section is devoted to ‘Social and Cultural Contexts’. Each chapter is accompanied by a short list of recommended further reading. Th is book was conceived and shaped by the late Sally Ledger, whose own important work on Dickens informs much of the scholarship here- with. I share with many of the contributors a sense of the painful honour it has been to be involved in the completion of this book as one small testament to Sally’s special ability to draw people together and to inspire our best work. Th is one’s for Sally!

             University of Leicester

N o t e s o n r e f e r e n c e s

Quotations from Charles Dickens’s novels are sourced, where applicable, to volume or book and chapter, and are given in brackets, e.g., Th e Pickwick Papers (ch. ) or Oliver Twist (book , ch. ). References to Dickens’s letters are, unless otherwise stated, to the twelve-volume Pilgrim Edition detailed below, and are denoted by volume and page, e.g. Letters ,  , .

Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , – , ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Graham Storey, K. J. Fielding and Anthony Laude (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. , –, ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens , vol.   , – , ed. Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Angus Easson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens , vol.  , – , ed. Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , – , ed. Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , –, ed. Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). Th e Letters of Charles Dickens, vol.  , – , ed. Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ).

Other references are supplied in Further Reading, at the end of the book, or in the endnotes to individual chapters.

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