Dickens and the Material Culture of the Victorian Novel | University of Kent
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California State University, Northridge the Charms Of
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE THE CHARMS OF ASSUMPTION: ROLE PLAYING IN DICKENS'S LATER NOVELS A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English by Patrick Byron Hunter January 1988 The Thesis o~Patrick Byron Hunter is approved: Lawrence Stewart California State University, Northridge ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I most especially thank Dr. Harry Stone, whose brilliant expertise as a Dickensian and meticulous attention as an advisor helped to create many of this thesis's virtues and none of its flaws. I also thank Valerie, my dearest friend, whose insight inspired me to begin this thesis and whose support enabled me to finish it. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments •• . iii Abstract • • • • • . • v Chapters: I. Introduction . • • • 1 II. Dickens and Role Playing • . 8 III. Expected Roles: Great Expectations •• • • • .18 IV. Behavioral Roles: Our Mutual Friend • • .34 v. The Impersonator . • • • ~ .45 VI. The Player Without a Role. • • .57 VII. Conclusion • • . .67 Works Cited. • • • • .70 iv ABSTRACT THE CHARMS OF ASSUMPTION: ROLE PLAYING IN DICKENS'S LATER NOVELS by Patrick Byron Hunter Master of Arts in English This thesis demonstrates how roles, or the facades which human beings project when interacting with others, provide an approach for understanding the characters and themes in Dickens's fiction written after 1857, from Little Dorrit to The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It argues that the characters in the author's final period desperately play roles to find fulfillment and also demonstrates how Dickens himself sought role playing to alleviate his own personal crises. ' ~ v The thesis approaches the fiction by categorizing roles into the two types: expected roles, or those roles demanded by society; and behavioral roles, or those structured, not by society, but by individuals. -
The Characters of a Christmas Carol Page 10: Pre and Post Show Questions & Discussion Starters Page 11: Resources Language Arts Core Curriculum Standards CCRR3
Theatre for Youth and Families A Christmas Carol Based on the story by Charles Dickens Adapted by David Bell Directed by Rosemary Newcott Study Guide, grades K-5 Created by the Counterpane Montessori Middle and High School Dramaturgy Team of Martha Spring and Katy Farr As part of the Alliance Theatre Institute for Educators and Teaching Artists’ Dramaturgy by Students program Under the guidance of Resident Teaching Artist Kim Baran Now in its 25th season, a magical holiday tradition for the whole family. On the Alliance Theatre stage November 21 through December 24, 2014 A Christmas Carol Study Guide 1 Happy Holidays from the Alliance Theatre! Welcome to the Alliance Theatre’s production of A Christmas Carol, written by Charles Dickens and adapted for stage by David H. Bell. This Study Guide has been created with the student audience in mind with the intent of providing a starting point as the audience prepares and then reflects together upon the Alliance Theatre for Youth and Families’ series production of A Christmas Carol. A note from the director, Rosemary Newcott, the Sally G. Tomlinson Artistic Director of Theatre for Youth and Families: “I think of this show as a gift to Atlanta . I always hope it reflects the look and spirit of our community. The message is one that never grows old – that one is still capable of change — no matter what your age or what you have experienced!” Table of Contents Page 3: Charles Dickens Page 4-5: Vocabulary **(see note below) Page 6: Cast of Characters; Synopsis of the story Page 7: Money of Victorian England Page 8: Design your Own Christmas Carol Ghost Costume! Page 9: Word Search: The Characters of A Christmas Carol Page 10: Pre and Post show questions & discussion starters Page 11: Resources Language Arts Core Curriculum Standards CCRR3. -
Victorian Ghost Stories and the Christmas Market
Illumine Vol. 11, No. 1, 2012 “Winter Stories — Ghost Stories... Round the Christmas Fire”: Victorian Ghost Stories and the Christmas Market Caley Ehnes, University of Victoria Abstract Using the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” in the 1852 Christmas number of Dickens’s Household Words as a case study, this paper examines how the publication of Victorian ghost stories in Christmas numbers redefines the ghost story, transforming it from a modern text participating in contemporary debates on spiritualism into a social text participating in the broader cultural project of reaffirming the nation’s (religious) traditions in the face of (secular) modernity. While the themes of Christmas ghost stories explicitly address social issues and secular, middle-class cultural values, the morals and social traditions promoted by Christmas fiction cannot exist outside of the era’s contemporary conversations about the place of religion in a modern, industrial society. The ghosts and goblins of Dickens’s Christmas fiction address and attempt to correct the social ills of modern society through a secularised application of Christian values and behaviours. n his first full-length novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Charles Dickens introduces readers to the Christmas traditions prevalent in his youth. Our host, Mr. Wardle, informs the IPickwickian crowd, “[o]ur invariable custom [is to have everyone sit] down with us on Christmas Eve, as you see them now—servants and all; and here we wait, until the clock strikes twelve, to usher Christmas in, and beguile the time with forfeits and old stories.”1 1 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers. -
Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words
COMMODITY CULTURE IN DICKENS’S HOUSEHOLD WORDS For Mary and in memory of Ron Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words The Social Life of Goods CATHERINE WATERS University of New England, Australia First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Catherine Waters 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Catherine Waters has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Waters, Catherine Commodity culture in Dickens’s Household words : the social life of goods. – (The nineteenth century series) 1. Household words 2. Commercial products – Great Britain – History – 19th century I. Title 052 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Waters, Catherine. Commodity culture in Dickens’s Household words : the social life of goods / by Catherine Waters. p. cm. — (The nineteenth century series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5578-7 (hbk) 1. Household words. 2. Commercial products—Great Britain—History—19th century. -
Dickens : a Chronology of His Whereabouts
Tracking Charles Dickens : A Chronology of his Whereabouts Previous Dickens chronologies have focused on his life and works : this one does not attempt to repeat their work, but to supplement them by recording where he was at any given date. Dickens did not leave a set of appointment diaries, but fortunately he did leave a lifetime of letters, pinpointing at the head both the date and place of composition. This chronology is based on that information as published in the awesome Pilgrim Edition of his letters published by the Oxford University Press. The source of each entry in the chronology is identified. There are more than 14,000 letters in Pilgrim, giving a wealth of detail for the chronology. Many of the letters, of course, were written from his home or office, but he was an indefatigable traveller, and in the evening he still somehow found the energy to write one from his hotel room. Even so, there are inevitably many dates with no letter, and some of those gaps have been (and will be) filled from information in the letters themselves, and from other reliable sources. Philip Currah. DICKENSDAYS E.B. Elias Bredsdorff, Hans Andersen and Charles Dickens : A Friendship and Its Dissolution.Cambridge, Eng. : Heffer, 1956. 140 p. ill. E.P. Edward F. Payne, Dickens Days in Boston : A Record of Daily Events. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1927. 274 p. ill. E.J. Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens : His Tragedy and Triumph. London : Victor Gollancz, 1953. 2 v. (xxii, 1159, cxcvii p.) ill. J.F. John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens. -
Test Your Knowledge: a Dickens of a Celebration!
A Dickens of a Celebration atKinson f. KathY n honor of the bicentennial of Charles dickens’ birth, we hereby Take the challenge! challenge your literary mettle with a quiz about the great Victorian Iwriter. Will this be your best of times, or worst of times? Good luck! This novel was Dickens and his wife, This famous writer the first of Dickens’ Catherine, had this was a good friend 1 romances. 5 many children; 8 of Dickens and some were named after his dedicated a book to him. (a) David Copperfield favorite authors. (b) Martin Chuzzlewit (a) Mark twain (c) Nicholas Nickleby (a) ten (b) emily Bronte (b) five (c) hans christian andersen (c) nine Many of Dickens’ books were cliffhangers, Where was 2 published in monthly The conditions of the Dickens buried? installments. In 1841, readers in working class are a Britain and the U.S. anxiously 9 common theme in awaited news of the fate of the 6 (a) Portsmouth, england Dickens’ books. Why? pretty protagonist in this novel. (where he was born) (a) he had to work in a (b) Poet’s corner, westminster (a) Little Dorrit warehouse as a boy to abbey, London (b) A Tale of Two Cities help get his family out of (c) isles of scilly (c) The Old Curiosity Shop debtor’s prison. (b) his father worked in a livery and was This amusement This was an early mistreated there. park in Chatham, pseudonym used (c) his mother worked as England, is 3 by Dickens. a maid as a teenager and named10 after Dickens. -
A Bibliography Selected by Robert Newsom for the 2002 Dickens Universe
bibliography A Bibliography Selected by Robert Newsom for the 2002 Dickens Universe Note that some items listed here are themselves links. These appear in blue and are marked by underlining. Links that appear as DJ take you to images of dust jackets. For an image of the Dombey & Son wrapper design, click here or on the thumbnail: This a large file (more than 200KB) that may take a while to open. For the summer 2002 reading schedule and discussion and paper topics, click here or on the thumbnail: This is an Adobe Acrobat ® file that requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader to be read. If you do not have the Reader, you may download it for free by clicking here. The Dombey & Son bibliography immediately below in general becomes more selective the more distant the date of publication. I am grateful to those faculty of the Dickens Project who have suggested titles. Items in this section that graduate- student and faculty participants in the 2002 Universe are asked to pay special http://dickens.ucsc.edu/bibliographies/dombeybiblio/DS_Biblio.html[11/22/11 10:42:15 AM] bibliography attention to are marked with an asterisk (*); additional recommended items are marked with a §. With the hope that it may be useful both to people just beginning their work in Dickens as well as those who like me are old enough to have forgotten many standard sources, I have appended with slight adaptation at the end of this bibliography a more general Dickens bibliography from my Charles Dickens Revisited DJ (New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000). -
Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round
Dickens by Numbers: the Christmas Numbers of Household Words and All the Year Round Aine Helen McNicholas PhD University of York English May 2015 Abstract This thesis examines the short fiction that makes up the annual Christmas Numbers of Dickens’s journals, Household Words and All the Year Round. Through close reading and with reference to Dickens’s letters, contemporary reviews, and the work of his contributors, this thesis contends that the Christmas Numbers are one of the most remarkable and overlooked bodies of work of the second half of the nineteenth century. Dickens’s short fictions rarely receive sustained or close attention, despite the continuing commitment by critics to bring the whole range of Dickens’s career into focus, from his sketches and journalism, to his late public readings. Through readings of selected texts, this thesis will show that Dickens’s Christmas Number stories are particularly powerful and experimental examples of some of the deepest and most recurrent concerns of his work. They include, for example, three of his four uses of a child narrator and one of his few female narrators, and are concerned with childhood, memory, and the socially marginal figures and distinctive voices that are so characteristic of his longer work. But, crucially, they also go further than his longer work to thematise the very questions raised by their production, including anonymity, authorship, collaboration, and annual return. This thesis takes Dickens’s works as its primary focus, but it will also draw throughout on the work of his contributors, which appeared alongside Dickens’s stories in these Christmas issues. -
The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and G.K. Chesterton’S View of Dickens’ Literary Greatness
European Joint Master’s Degree in English and American Studies Second Cycle (D.M. 270/2004) Final Thesis The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club and G.K. Chesterton’s View of Dickens’ Literary Greatness Supervisor Ch. Prof. Enrica Villari Second Reader Ch. Prof. Clémence Folléa Candidate Mattia Quagli Matriculation Number 866097 Academic Year 2017 / 2018 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 PART 1: G.K. Chesterton: a Major Voice in Dickens Studies 4 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................ 5 CHAPTER I: A Life Devoted to Literature: Chesterton‘s Main Ideas ....................... 10 CHAPTER II: A Major Voice in Dickens Studies ................................................... 18 CHAPTER III: The Defence of the Common Man: a Funny Democracy ................. 21 CHAPTER IV: Active Optimism and ―Vagueness of Discontent‖: Dickens‘ Special Struggle for the Oppressed ...................................................................................... 31 CHAPTER V: Old ―Merry England‖: Mirth and Merry-making as the Essence of Englishness ............................................................................................................. 36 PART 2: The Literary Greatness of The Pickwick Papers 41 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 42 CHAPTER I: The Pickwick Papers and the Literary Criticism Prior to Chesterton .. 45 CHAPTER II: From Troubled Origin to Popular Success: The Pickwick -
Our Mutual Friend"
W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1990 "My Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards": Narrative and Social Criticism in "Our Mutual Friend" Gregory Eric Huteson College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Huteson, Gregory Eric, ""My Lords and Gentlemen and Honourable Boards": Narrative and Social Criticism in "Our Mutual Friend"" (1990). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625603. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-6xbb-7s05 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. "MY LORDS AND GENTLEMEN AND HONOURABLE BOARDS" Narrative Audience and Social Criticism in Our Mutual Friend A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Gregory Eric Huteson 1990 APPROVAL SHEET This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts ■y Eric HutesonGfego, Approved, August 1990 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writer would like to confess a debt of gratitude to Professor Deborah Morse, who directed the thesis, for her astute criticism and her patience. He would also like to express his appreciation to Professor Mary Ann Kelly for her comments and criticism and to Professor Terry Meyers for his careful readings and his advice and encouragement. -
Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: the Print Culture of a Victorian Street, Hardback, 261 Pages, London: Ashgate, 2015
Mary L. Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds and Mayhew on Wellington Street: The Print Culture of a Victorian Street, hardback, 261 pages, London: Ashgate, 2015. ISBN: 9781472442048; £65. Reviewed by Michael Slater (Birkbeck, University of London, UK) The Literary London Journal, Volume 12 Number 1–2 (Spring/Autumn 2015) In this fascinating, meticulously-researched (and somewhat densely-written) book Mary Shannon focusses on Wellington Street, off the Strand, as having been the heart of London’s ‘print networks’, with particular reference to the period 1843–1853 and devotes one chapter also to its Australian offshoot, Collins Street in Melbourne. She shows that during her chosen decade more than twenty newspapers and periodicals had their offices on Wellington Street, including Punch (briefly), The Examiner, Reynold’s Miscellany, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, Dickens’s Household Words and Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Newspapers, magazines, periodicals of all kinds create ‘imagined communities’ of readers but here in Wellington Street was to be found an actual face-to-face community involving, as described by Edgar Browne in his Phiz and Dickens, ‘a constant intercommunication between authors, artists, engravers, printers, and the like’. Dickens and Reynolds must have often passed on the street, but did they acknowledge each other? It seems highly unlikely that Dickens would have given the time of day to one of the chief plagiarisers of Pickwick Papers, whom he would also have regarded as little better than a pornographer, but there seems to be no evidence one way or the other. More significant, from a literary point of view, is Shannon’s persuasive contention (illustrated by a brief case-study of Bleak House in her final chapter) that the close juxtaposition of their offices makes ‘a significant backdrop to the fascination with connections and coincidences in work by Dickens, Jerrold, Mayhew, Reynolds and Sala, as well as R. -
NVS 3-2-7 M-Gould-R-Mitchell
Understanding the Literary Theme Park: Dickens World as Adaptation Marty Gould and Rebecca N. Mitchell (University of South Florida & University of Texas-Pan American, USA) Abstract: How to make sense of Dickens World, an “indoor visitor attraction” which resists the conventions defining similar enterprises? Though it promises to “take visitors on a journey of Dickens lifetime,” transporting them “to Dickensian England,” it is not precisely a Disney-style theme park, a site of literary tourism, or a site of historical significance. Bringing to life the worlds of Dickens’s novels – wherein physical environments, events, and characters are inextricable – depends upon a process of adaptation analogous, we argue, to cinematic or literary adaptation. This article considers Dickens World as a case study in adaptation; we suggest that its attractions demonstrate fundamental adaptive concerns: structure, nostalgia, spectacle, narrative, and commodification. Approaching Dickens World as the spectacularisation of the dynamics of literary encounter, the resulting analysis expands the boundaries of adaptation theory while delineating the aspects of Dickens’s work which make its adaptation compelling but ultimately – as Dickens World shows – challenging. Keywords: adaptation, commodification, Charles Dickens, Dickens World, literary tourism, narrative, nostalgia, spectacle, theme parks, Victoriana. ***** Dickens World will take visitors on a journey of Dickens’s lifetime as they step back in time to Dickensian England […], transporting visitors from the depths of London’s sewers through atmospheric streets, courtyards, markets and shops […]. Visitors will feel as though they have returned to one of the most exciting periods of British History to see ‘The Best and Worst of Times’ as they immerse themselves in the imposing architecture and street scenes […].