Dickens and His Publics

Abstract

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• Dickens and His Publics
• Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) and Annette Federico (bio)

When Charles Dickens died on 7 June 1870, the outpouring of public feeling all but drowned out the tempered judgements of Victorian literary critics and reviewers: it was not the moment for “exact criticism,” as Anthony Trollope put it. “It is fatuous to condemn that as deficient in art which has been so full of art as to captivate all men,” Trollope conceded. Dickens “could measure the reading public, – probably taking his measure of it unconsciously, – and knew what the public wanted of him.” Such an intuitive connection with masses of people is so rare that “no critic is justified in putting aside the consideration of that circumstance” (Collins 322–25). Two years later, after the publication of John Forster’s biography of Dickens and as reassessments of the novels started to heat up, George Henry Lewes also recognized that readers’ affection for Dickens’s work made him a difficult case for the literary critic whose job is to form judgments, or, in Lewes’s phrase, “to pronounce absolute verdicts” on aesthetic grounds (142). That is not the right way to go about it with Dickens. Those critics who tried to find reasons for their objections to Dickens’s art, wrote Lewes, simply “failed to recognise the supreme powers which ensured his triumph in spite of all defects” (154).

We latter-day critics (and readers of Dickens Quarterly) have been trying to define and describe, nail down and spell out, the nature of Dickens’s “supreme powers” – we almost wrote his superpowers! – in our professional discourse for a century and a quarter, in almost 800 academic books and close to 5,000 scholarly articles in many languages. That seems like a lot of ink, a lot of research, a lot of argumentation. But these numbers do not come close to conveying the reach of Dickens’s appeal to readers whose writing and thinking about Dickens does not get listed in academic databases – books for the educated general public, such as John Mullan’s The Artful Dickens or Lee Jackson’s Dickensland (to name two recent ones), books for children and young adults, literary companions for readers getting started with Dickens, memoirs and recollections, books in cultural studies (such as Nick Hornby’s Dickens and Prince), illustrated books, coffee table books [End Page 6] (Hillary Macaskill’s Charles Dickens at Home), celebrations (Simon Callow’s books), histories and retellings (Les Standiford’s The Man Who Invented Christmas), and adaptations of the novels in all media. As Zadie Smith remarked recently in an essay in The New Yorker, it seems as if Dickens is everywhere, “like weather.”

Indeed, Dickens is more ubiquitous outside of academia than he is inside – and we cannot think of many canonical writers you can say that about in the twenty-first century. Dickens has so many publics today that trying to keep him safe within the precincts of “scholarly expertise” is neither possible nor, as we hope this special issue of DQ will show, altogether desirable, at least not all of the time. Moreover, it is our contention that scholarship too can benefit from reckoning with the role Dickens plays in our off-duty, non-professional lives as parents, partners, students, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Opening the pages of the journal to different styles of critical writing – memoir, storytelling, dialogue – could be a small step toward refreshing conversations about Dickens’s importance and persistence, our difficulties with him, his enticements, and the many claims he makes on us as readers at this particular time.

The idea for this special issue came to us on the final day of the Dickens Society Symposium on “Dickens and His Publics,” hosted by City, University of London in the summer of 2022. Lifting a pint at the end of a guided Dickens Walking Tour, a handful of symposium participants discussed the papers we heard at the conference, our teaching jobs, our plans after we left London. Now, after more than a year has passed, that hour in the pub seems like a magical intermission, a moment when the smart conference-goer and professional scholar relaxed into the ordinary...