From Xenophobia to Xenophilia: Dickens's Continental Drift

Abstract:In the decades between Charles Dickens's portrayal of Count Smorltork in The Pickwick Papers and his account of the foreign visitor who smashes Mr. Podsnap's chauvinism to atoms in Our Mutual Friend, Dickens's attitude toward Continental foreigners seems to have undergone a radical renovation. This essay argues that one key to understanding Dickens's "drift" from xenophobia to xenophilia is to trace its imaginative origins in the essay "Travelling Abroad" (1860), which centers upon an English traveler on the Continent who is dogged by nightmarish visions of cannibalism and corpses—who is riddled through, that is, with the powerful compulsion to consume what he sees. "Travelling Abroad" thus foreshadows and bridges the sophisticated economic critiques of Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, and it does so in the act of indicting Englishness, not foreignness, for the barbarity implicit in its narrator's imagined acts. In this sense, I suggest, Dickens's apparently softened view of foreigners in Our Mutual Friend has much to do with his hardened attitude toward England, and particularly his hardened view of the psychological and cultural effects of its maturing capitalism.