{"title":"These Three, Met Again: The Real Resurrection of Edwin Drood","authors":"C. Glatt","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Despite a comparatively recent flourishing of postcolonial readings of the novel, criticism of The Mystery of Edwin Drood has been focused predominantly on John Jasper, the respected choir-master and outwardly doting uncle whose opium-fueled fantasies lead, to all appearances, to an earnest, seemingly successful attempt on his nephew’s life. Seething with resentment and frustrated passion, Jasper is a figure of doubleness and repression whose depiction reflects an emerging Victorian interest in the unconscious mind; several biographers and critics have read him as a refracted mirror into Dickens’s own troubled psyche.1 Far less attention has been paid to the eponymous Edwin himself. A self-confessed “shallow, surface kind of fellow” whose early death seems in any case to remove him from the narrative economy (11; ch. 2), Edwin proves less compelling than his tormented uncle. Yet Edwin, I will argue, lies at the center of the novel’s exploration of proto-Freudian notions of consciousness and selfhood. Representative of a character type far more typical of Dickens’s earlier novels, Edwin, in death, suggests the psychological and narrative limits of this model: the surface fellow cannot withstand either a world that demands increasing interiority of its heroes or the villain–protagonist who possesses such complexity. At the same time, Edwin’s disappearance casts into relief the ultimate unfitness of Jasper – and, perhaps, of any other character – to fulfill his vacated place, a position supported by strong hints that Edwin must return in some form before the work of the novel can be completed. As a reminder of a previous phase of Dickens’s career and as a symbolic other half of Jasper’s divided consciousness, Edwin, in death, resists obsolescence and suggests his continuing relevance to models of both narrative and the self.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"186 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45258126","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 the Anatomy of Evil: Sesquicentennial Essays ed. by Mitsuharu Matsuoka (review)","authors":"J. Baker","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0016","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"251 - 254"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43227532","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":"“Becoming Head-gear Is of the Utmost Importance”: Gender Performance, Social Differentiation, and the Codes of Hat Etiquette in Dombey and Son","authors":"Houliang Chen","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"138 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44159998","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 Man with Jane: Another Look into Bellamy’s Kitchen","authors":"William F. Long","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0024","url":null,"abstract":"“The House” and “Bellamy’s,” two sketches by Boz published in the Evening Chronicle on 7 March and 11 April 1835 respectively, contain short, vivid descriptions of some dozen unnamed parliamentarians.1 Their subjects are likely to have been readily recognized by many contemporary readers.2 Seven “originals” were named in 1954 (Carlton) and the identity of a further three suggested more recently (Long). In the present paper, another of the subjects and the circumstances in 1835 which made him noteworthy are considered.","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"239 - 247"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49279862","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 Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby (review)","authors":"Joel J. Brattin","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"257 - 259"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44604525","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 Unknown Adaptation of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: Amateur Theatre, Film Avant-garde, and the Magic Lantern","authors":"A. Kovalová","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0023","url":null,"abstract":"In December 1932, the Rochester Community Players (RCP), one of the oldest continuously operated amateur theatre organizations in America, premiered A Christmas Carol, an adaptation of the famous story by Charles Dickens. This innovative production included scenes “on screen”: Scrooge’s visions of the past were presented as films projected during the performance. These films were made with the involvement of Dr. James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber, key figures in the history of American avant-garde cinema. Adaptations of Charles Dickens’s works have become a wide field of study; there are many excellent books and articles on how Dickens has been adapted in theatre and in cinema.1 Some of these works are focused on A Christmas Carol in particular, but none seems to mention the Rochester version. In Dickens Dramatized, by H. Philip Bolton, the fundamental reference for the dramatic versions of Dickens’s works, there is a list of 357 adaptations of A Christmas Carol staged in 1844–1984 (Bolton 237–67), but the RCP adaptation is not included in this list. The same can be said about the list of “Notable Film, Television, and Radio Adaptations of A Christmas Carol” compiled by Richard Kelly (233–37), as well as the more detailed filmography in Fred Guida’s monograph, A Christmas Carol and Its Adaptations (171–232). One might expect that, thanks to the involvement of Watson and Webber, the RCP production would interest historians of the American film avantgarde rather than Dickens scholars. However, although the revolutionary films by Watson and Webber, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933), have become classics of world avant-garde film, and have","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"208 - 238"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48883370","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":"Biblical Allusion in the Opening Numbers of Three of Charles Dickens’s Serialized Novels","authors":"Zhuo Yuanyuan","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Charles Dickens’s allusive and thematic use of the Bible in his novels and other writings has caught critical attention over the past four decades, resulting in studies that either explore his personal belief and his attitude towards religious and theological issues,1 or interpret his texts’ themes, characters, or narratives by examining their connections with biblical counterparts.2 Most recently, Jennifer Gribble’s Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” (2021) has explored how Dickens engages the Judeo-Christian grand narrative in his novels in dialogue with other contemporary narratives. However, critical examination of biblical allusion in Dickens’s novels has overlooked the aspect of serial publication that shaped how his contemporary readers would have approached and read his works. Each of the three novels under consideration in this article was serialized either in Dickens’s weekly magazine Household Words (Hard Times) or in separate monthly instalments (Bleak House and Little Dorrit). This article aims to theorize both explicit and implicit use of biblical allusion and its workings in the opening numbers of these three novels as structural and thematic tools that help organize oppositional stances embodied in characters and institutions and that foster active reading by drawing upon the reader’s familiarity with the Bible.3","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"155 - 173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45437374","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":"Developing the “lines”: Politically Significant Landscapes in Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities","authors":"Nanako Konoshima","doi":"10.1353/dqt.2023.0021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2023.0021","url":null,"abstract":"Philip Collins once noted that A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, two “remarkably different” novels, are “consecutive” and “close together” (“A Tale” 337). In fact, the consecutiveness of the two works deserves closer and fuller examination than Collins suggests, and the present essay teases out thematic and textual links between them, related to the overall idea of the two novels, that have gone unexplored. These links revolve around Dickens’s creation of politically significant landscape motifs, and I argue that the description of the marshes in Great Expectations is a successful development of the earlier novel’s revolutionary landscapes, both in aesthetic and emblematic terms. The marked linearity of the landscapes in the two works, pictorially presented with bruised figures in the foreground, visually represents egalitarian ideals. Yet, at the same time, they both juxtapose the paradoxical, contradictory symbols of the beacon and the gibbet, exposing Dickens’s contentious class-consciousness. The evocation of the marshes in the opening chapters of Great Expectations has always been praised and has prompted much critical interest.1 Notably, Dickens’s much abridged public reading text of the novel (never performed) retains almost all the original paragraphs describing the marshes in chapter 1, suggesting that they perform an essential role in realizing the story’s main idea. Previous studies have examined the function of the marshy landscapes in Pip’s narrative and revealed the ways in which they embody the experience of the “isolated” and “alienated” Dickensian hero (Miller 250–51).2 Concurrently, however, these landscapes evoke a wider concept","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"174 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48825760","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 Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People by Carolyn Vellenga Berman (review)","authors":"John M. L. Drew","doi":"10.1353/vpr.2023.a905143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2023.a905143","url":null,"abstract":"In his lengthy speech condemning the Absolutist regime of Miguel I of Portugal on 1 June 1829, Viscount Palmerston gave a memorable account (inserted into Hansard by special permission) of the operation of power in human society: “There is in nature no moving power but mind, all else is passive and inert; in human affairs this power is opinion; in political affairs it is public opinion; and he who can grasp this power, with it will subdue the fleshly arm of physical strength and compel it to work out his purpose.” Indeed, those who “know how to avail themselves of the passions, and the interests, and the opinions of mankind, are able to gain an ascendancy, and to exercise a sway over human affairs, far out of proportion greater than belong to the power and resources of the state” (Hansard ) 1668). Palmerston took it for granted that it fell to statesmen to wield such power, but during his lifetime, the rise of what Macaulay a few years later famously dubbed the “Fourth Estate” of the realm saw journalists, newspaper editors, and even writers of popular fiction assuming a similar influence, to the consternation of Establishment figures like Sir James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94), who felt democratic institutions could be dangerously undermined through being called to account by unelected populist rabble-rousers:","PeriodicalId":41747,"journal":{"name":"DICKENS QUARTERLY","volume":"40 1","pages":"248 - 251"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49346928","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}