Mapping Dickens

Abstract:This paper begins by assessing the work of Franco Moretti and his Stanford colleagues in using quantitative formalism for mapping nineteenth-century European fiction. My objection to applying this technology to the writings of Charles Dickens is that quantitative formalism and distant reading conspire with Benthamite calculations to erase the specific in favor of norms established by grossing up thousands of data points. Dickens's artistic belief in the importance of representing the individual and assessing its relationship to the mass overrides the strategies Moretti practices. Nonetheless, a number of issues raised by him may be amenable to a modified practice of distant reading. In the second half of the paper I propose that if such technology is applied to a single author, Dickens, and is careful to distinguish the times of composition, publication, and reissue of texts, a multi-dimensional interactive map of London, registering the geographic, administrative, and structural times, places, history, and references within his writing, could document both his journalistic realism and his imagination in new ways, and thus better evaluate his contribution to the century's aesthetic and conceptual achievements.