DICKENS QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Bent and Broken","authors":"Sean Grass","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920204","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920204","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay reflects on Charles Dickens’s <i>Great Expectations</i> and what it has meant, and continues to mean, to me as a reader and scholar of Dickens. Beginning from the observation that students seem invariably to detest Pip, the essay explains how reading the novel hermeneutically, as a lesson for my own life, has helped me to ruminate the complex feelings of shame that I have long felt regarding my own working-class childhood, and my own Estella. What I suggest finally is that, while neither of <i>Great Expectations</i>’s endings is particularly happy, the novel ends with a muted but hopeful message about finding contentment, peace, and even joy despite being bent and broken</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953948","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dickens and His Publics","authors":"Michelle Allen-Emerson, Annette Federico","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920199","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> Dickens and His Publics <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) and Annette Federico (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>W</strong>hen 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).</p> <p>We latter-day critics (and readers of <em>Dickens Quarterly</em>) 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 <em>The Artful Dickens</em> or Lee Jackson’s <em>Dickensland</em> (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 <em>Dickens and Prince</em>), illustrated books, coffee table books <strong>[End Page 6]</strong> (Hillary Macaskill’s <em>Charles Dickens at Home</em>), celebrations (Simon Callow’s books), histories and retellings (Les Standiford’s <em>The Man Who Invented Christmas</em>), and adaptations of the novels in all media. As Zadie Smith remarked recently in an essay in <em>The New Yorker</em>, it seems as if Dickens is everywhere, “like weather.”</p> <p>Indeed, Dickens is more ubiquitous outside of ","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Dickens Checklist","authors":"Dominic Rainsford","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920212","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> The Dickens Checklist <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dominic Rainsford (bio) </li> </ul> <p><em>The Dickens Checklist, recording new publications, doctoral dissertations, and online resources of significance for Dickens studies, appears in each issue of the journal. A cumulative cross-referenced edition of the Checklist, consisting of listings since vol. 37, no. 1 (March 2020), is available at</em> dickenssociety.org<em>, and is updated once a year</em>.</p> <h2>________</h2> <h2>Secondary Sources: Bibliography and Reference</h2> Palmer, Scott V. <em>Charles Dickens on Screen</em>. Cypress Hills Press, 2023. <h2>Secondary Sources: Biography and Criticism</h2> Boman, Charlotte. “In Search of ‘Some Bond of Union’: Picturing the Domestic Reading Circle in Victorian Photographs.” <em>Picturing the Reader: Reading and Representation in the Long Nineteenth Century</em>, edited by Beth Palmer et al., Peter Lang Publishing, 2022, pp. 163–188. Writing and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, 11. [Section: “Pictures ‘tell a story’: Dickens and At-Home Photography”] Bowles, Hugo. “The Poetics of Mrs Gamp’s Conversation – Are They Dickens’s ‘Slips of the Pen’?” <em>Bridging the Gap between Conversation Analysis and Poetics: Studies in Talk-in-Interaction and Literature Twenty-Five Years after Jefferson</em>, edited by Raymond F. Person et al., Routledge, 2022, pp. 119–39. Capuano, Peter J. <em>Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination: The Inimitable and Victorian Body Language</em>. Cornell UP, 2023. Chen Houliang. “‘To Have No Work to Do [Is] Strange’: The Performance of Leisure in <em>Little Dorrit</em>.” <em>Nineteenth-Century Contexts</em>, vol. 45, no. 4, Sept. 2023, pp. 313–28. Conary, Jennifer. “Dickensian Departures: Innovation and Originality in G. W. M. Reynolds’s <em>Pickwick Abroad</em>.” <em>G. W. M. Reynolds Reimagined: Studies in Authorship, Radicalism, and Genre, 1830–1870</em>, edited by Jennifer Conary and Mary L. Shannon, Routledge, 2023, pp. 27–51. Dickens, Gerald. <em>My Life on the Road with</em> A Christmas Carol. Bumblebee Books, 2023. <em>Dickens Quarterly</em>, vol. 40, no. 4, Dec. 2023. [Tara Moore, “Pickwick and Scrooge: Two Excellent Men of Business,” pp. 413–35; Joshua Dobbs, “‘It was a strange figure’: The Fairies of <em>A Christmas Carol</em>,” pp. 436–56; Sara Martín, “Jaggers the Plotter and the Pretty Child: Masculine Vulnerability to Beauty in <em>Great Expectations</em>,” pp. 457–75; William F. Long, “‘The wife who has plagued him … &amp; … is rather lunatical’: A Contemporary Private Reference to the Dickens Scandal,” pp. 476–87; Natalie J. McKnight, review of <em>Charles Dickens, Death and Christmas</em>, by Robert L. Patten, pp. 488–90; Tamsin Evernden, review of <em>The Ways of the Word: Episodes in Verbal Attention</em>, by Garrett Stewart, pp. 490–93; Christian Lehmann, review of <em>Reading Bodies in","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953837","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hair Apparent; or, Dickens's Public Hair","authors":"Natalie McKnight","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920208","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Dickens plays off the strange hybrid nature of hair throughout his fiction. Hair is both alive and dead, public but also private, part of and not part of the body. Dickens uses hair to create both comedy and pathos, and it projects key aspects of many characters while simultaneously defying their control. Through hair, Dickens raises epistemological questions about the human tendency to categorize the world in binaries, and he suggests that all such categories misrepresent reality and fail to capture the complexity of human experience.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953835","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman (review)","authors":"Dominic Rainsford","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920211","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain</em> by Lawrence Goldman <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Dominic Rainsford (bio) </li> </ul> <em>Lawrence Goldman</em>. <em>Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain</em>. Oxford UP, 2022. Pp. lxiii + 371. £40.49. ISBN 978-0-19-284774-4 (hb). <p><strong>O</strong>ne might be forgiven for expecting this to be a very dull book. That is certainly the impression created by the unsmiling faces of Ada Lovelace (datalogical prodigy and Byron’s daughter), William Farr (of the General Register Office; subsequently President of the Statistical Society of London), Florence Nightingale, Prince Albert, and Charles Babbage (computer pioneer), which ponderously adorn the dust-jacket. However, it contains a wide range of information and ideas, much of it potentially useful to Dickens scholars, and the good news is that Goldman’s reader will require no “technical knowledge of statistics” (xxxviii).</p> <p>Following a long Prologue, which jumps ahead to the “Zenith” of Victorian statistics in 1860, the book retreats chronologically and settles into a methodical five-part structure. In Part I, Goldman describes the background to Victorian statistics in the rudimentary “political arithmetic” of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Part II, he describes the establishment of influential statistical societies in the 1820s and 1830s in Cambridge, Manchester, and Clerkenwell. Part III is devoted to chapters on the principal “intellectual influences” on the turn to statistics, including Babbage and Lovelace, Richard Jones (professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London), William Whewell (Cambridge polymath and inventor of the term “scientist”), Adolphe Quetelet (Belgian statistician <strong>[End Page 127]</strong> and reformer), Alexander von Humboldt, and – as “opposition” – Disraeli, Ruskin, Carlyle, and our man Dickens. Part IV, on “Statistics at Mid-Century,” describes the growing acceptance and practical use of statistics, and especially in the field of medicine – where it could demonstrably be linked to saving lives. Part V contrasts “Conservative Nationalism” with “Liberal Internationalism” at the International Statistical Congresses of the 1850s, 60s and 70s. “Conservative Nationalism” is thereafter shown to develop into something more sinister, and for a time at least this is “The End of the Statistical Movement,” as Francis Galton introduces a far higher level of mathematical sophistication but reveals his “moral inadequacy,” turning from the desire to use numbers to understand and ameliorate society to eugenics, racism, and speculative social engineering. A brief concluding chapter takes us from the nineteenth century to our own time, “From Statistics to Big Data, 1822–2022.”</p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Done with Dickens","authors":"Jude Piesse","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920202","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920202","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This article brings a creative–critical approach to bear on my long, and evolving, relationship with Dickens. Through examining the tenacious grip that Dickens has had on my imaginative, emotional, and professional lives, I explore the conundrum of continuing to admire a writer whose ubiquity, personal history, and even style can sometimes cause embarrassment to contemporary publics. In the face of such feelings, and my ambivalence about literary hero-worship, I make a case for Dickens’s unique power and lasting relevance. I explore how Dickens has shaped my creative imagination, education, and work as a university lecturer, and how his writing continues to impact on the lives of friends, family, and students. The article takes the form of a creative–critical personal essay, combining autobiographical accounts of growing up in Dickens’s Kent, and of engaging with <i>Great Expectations</i> at different life stages, with the scholarly perspectives that underpin my publications and university teaching.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Teaching and Reading Dickens in Brazil: A Tale of Two Cities as a Case Study","authors":"Marcela Santos Brigida","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920206","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920206","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Taking the experience of teaching Dickens in Brazil as a point of departure, this essay proposes a brief overview of the novelist’s initial reception in the South American country as part of an ongoing investigation of his multi-layered influence on Brazilian culture from the nineteenth century to the present day. Dickens’s impact on Brazilian publishing and pop culture ranges from the many translated editions of his works to his influence over local writers and artists. The second half of the essay produces a case study of teaching Dickens’s <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> to a class of undergraduate students in Rio de Janeiro, arguing for the importance of allowing students to respond creatively to literary works in an academic setting.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"Cancelled\" by the Revolution?: The Limits of Celebrity in A Tale of Two Cities","authors":"Elizabeth Bridgham","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920207","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920207","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Inspired by a teaching experience in which a group of students equated the mob violence of the French Revolution with the contemporary phenomenon of “cancel culture,” this article considers the ways in which Dickens’s <i>A Tale of Two Cities</i> incorporates a consideration of the foundations and limits of celebrity power. By examining contemporary studies of the history and significance of “cancellation,” we can understand their relevance to a Dickens who was anxious about maintaining his celebrity status and controlling his image amid a marital scandal that threatened his ability to do both. Read through this lens, the experience of Doctor Manette, a character who uses his celebrity to protect his loved ones and whose celebrity power is then turned against him, speaks to our present moment as Dickens’s expression of concern at what might happen when a previously adoring public takes the reins of reputation from the prominent.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Big Novels for Little Folks: Dickens Adapted, Abridged, and Excerpted for Young Readers","authors":"Kirsten Andersen","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920201","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Classic novels retold for children have received limited scholarly attention. Often cheaply printed, the interest they arouse is also transient: child readers become adults and either lose interest or move on to the unabridged text. Despite their transience and ephemerality, “classic” novels rewritten for children, especially retellings of Dickens, merit scholarly examination. These retellings appeal to child readers by centring the plots that revolve around child characters, shaping the popular imagination and reception history of these works. Since their initial publication, Dickens’s novels have been adapted, abridged, and anthologized for young readers by editors and publishers with various motives: to profit off Dickens’s fame, to promote literacy, and to support social change. Texts that rewrite “classic” authors like Dickens for young audiences reveal our cultural assumptions and anxieties about literacy.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Wisdom of the Head and a Wisdom of the Heart: Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture","authors":"Eric G. Lorentzen","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2024.a920205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920205","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>Only by recognizing that Dickens’s novels not only teach us a great deal about Victorian England, but also about our lives in the here and now, can we remain vibrantly one of Dickens’s “publics.” We must transcend the usual “wisdom of the head,” the traditional academic study of his novels, and connect with the “wisdom of the heart” as well, the meaningful student-centred ways that his texts resonate in actual everyday lives – pedagogical advice that Dickens himself famously proffered in <i>Hard Times</i>. In my recent course, “Dickens, Disney, and Popular Culture,” my students and I did just that, discovering both Dickens, and his continuing influence on our lives, together during a memorable semester.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2024-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139953900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}