palgrave advances in charles dickens studies
Palgrave Advances Titles include: John Bowen and Robert L. Patten (editors) CHARLES DICKENS STUDIES Phillip Mallett (editor) THOMAS HARDY STUDIES Lois Oppenheim (editor) SAMUEL BECKETT STUDIES Jean-Michel Rabaté (editor) JAMES JOYCE STUDIES Frederick S. Roden (editor) OSCAR WILDE STUDIES Nicholas Williams (editor) WILLIAM BLAKE STUDIES Forthcoming: Peter Rawlings (editor) HENRY JAMES STUDIES Anna Snaith (editor) VIRGINIA WOOLF STUDIES Palgrave Advances Series Standing Order ISBN 1 4039 3512 2 (Hardback) 1 4039 3513 0 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in the case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
palgrave advances in charles dickens studies edited by john bowen and robert l. patten
Introduction, selection and editorial matter John Bowen and Robert L. Patten 2006 All chapters Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-1285-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St Martin s Press LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-4039-1286-2 DOI 10.1057/9780230524200 ISBN 978-0-230-52420-0 (ebook) This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Palgrave advances in Charles Dickens studies / edited by John Bowen and Robert L. Patten. p. cm. (Palgrave advances) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Dickens, Charles, 1812 1870 Criticism and interpretation. I. Bowen, John, 1958 II. Patten, Robert L. III. Series. PR4588.P35 2005 823'.8 dc22 2005050044 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
contents list of illustrations notes on contributors vii viii 1. introduction 1 john bowen and robert l. patten 2. publishing in parts 11 robert l. patten 3. dickens and the writing of a life 48 rosemarie bodenheimer 4. performing character 69 malcolm andrews 5. dickens and plot 90 hilary m. schor 6. visualizing dickens 111 john sutherland 7. from blood to law: the embarrassments of family in dickens 131 helena michie 8. reforming culture 155 catherine waters 9. dickens s reading public 176 david vincent 10. politicized dickens: the journalism of the 1850s 198 joseph w. childers 11. psychoanalyzing dickens 216 carolyn dever
vi palgrave advances in charles dickens studies 12. historicizing dickens 234 catherine robson 13. dickens and the force of writing 255 john bowen timeline 273 ian wilkinson selected bibliography 304 acknowledgements 321 index 323
illustrations 4.1 R. W. Buss, Dickens Dream, c. 1872. Courtesy of Charles Dickens Museum 70 6.1 Detail from Osborne s maps of the Grand Junction and London and Birmingham Railways, 1838. Trustees of the National Library of Scotland 114 6.2 James Tissot, Gentleman in a Railway Carriage, 1872. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Alexander and Caroline Murdock De Witt Fund 116 6.3 J. M. W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, 1844. Photo The National Gallery, London 117 6.4 Hablot Knight Browne ( Phiz ), Monthly Wrapper of Dombey and Son, 1846. Courtesy of Charles Dickens Museum 120 6.5 George Cruikshank, Oliver introduced to the Respectable Old Gentleman, from Oliver Twist, 1837. Courtesy of Charles Dickens Museum 127 6.6 Marcus Stone, The Bird of Prey, from Our Mutual Friend, 1864. Courtesy of Charles Dickens Museum 128 vii
notes on contributors Malcolm Andrews is Professor of Victorian and Visual Studies at the University of Kent. He is the Editor of The Dickensian and author of Dickens and the Grown-up Child (Palgrave) and some books on landscape, art, and aesthetics, including Landscape and Western Art (Oxford). He is currently completing a book on Dickens s Public Readings. Rosemarie Bodenheimer is Professor of English at Boston College, specializing in the Victorian and modern novel, autobiography and biography. She is the author of The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction (1988) and The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction (1994). She is currently writing a book called What Dickens Knew. John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (2000) and has edited Dickens s Barnaby Rudge for Penguin. He is currently completing a jointly authored book with Anthea Trodd on the literary collaborations of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Joseph W. Childers is Professor of English at the University of California Riverside. He is the author of Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture as well as essays ranging from nineteenth-century sanitation reform to doux commerce in Dickens s fiction. He is currently completing The Empire Within, a study of works by and about immigrants and sojourners in England during the nineteenth century. Carolyn Dever is Professor of English and Women s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. Her work includes the books Skeptical Feminism: Activist Theory, Activist Practice and Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud, as well as ongoing research on perversity and Victorian domesticity. She serves as Associate Dean of Vanderbilt s College of Arts and Science. viii
notes on contributors ix Helena Michie is Agnes C. Arnold Professor in Humanities at Rice University. She has published numerous books and articles on Victorian culture and feminist theory, including The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures, Women s Bodies (Oxford, 1987), and Sororophobia: Differences among Women in Literature and Culture (Oxford, 1991). She has also co-edited, with Ronald R. Thomas, Nineteenth-Century Geographies; from the Victorian Age to the American Century (Rutgers, 2002). She has just finished a book entitled Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys Towards the Conjugal forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Robert L. Patten is Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities at Rice University and editor of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500 1900. He has written extensively on nineteenth-century British literature, illustration, and book history, and has contributed to the Oxford Reader s Companion to Dickens and the Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens. Catherine Robson is Associate Professor of English and Chancellor s Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where she specializes in nineteenth-century British cultural and literary studies. Author of Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton University Press, 2001) and coeditor of The Victorian Age for the Norton Anthology of English Literature, she is currently engaged on a book-length project entitled Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Hilary M. Schor is Professor of English and Law at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Scheherezade in the Marketplace: Elizabeth Gaskell and the Victorian Novel (1992) and Dickens and the Daughter of the House (Cambridge, 1999), and numerous articles on Victorian fiction and culture, contemporary literature, and film. She is currently at work on a study of women, curiosity, and the realist novel. John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College, London and visiting Professor of Literature at Caltech. His principal publications in the field include Thackeray at Work (1974), Victorian Novelists and Publishers (1976), The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989), Mrs. Humphry Ward (1991), Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Readers (1995), and a series of puzzle books on Victorian fiction beginning with Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1999). So You think You Know Thomas Hardy? will be published by Oxford University Press in autumn 2005. David Vincent is Professor of Social History and Pro Vice Chancellor at the Open University, and visiting fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford. He is the author of a range of works on the history of working-class autobiography, poverty, literacy, and official secrecy. Recent publications include The Rise of Mass Literacy. Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Polity Press, 2000), and, with Hannah Barker, Language, Print and Electoral Politics 1790 1832 (The Boydell Press, 2001).
x palgrave advances in charles dickens studies Catherine Waters is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New England, New South Wales. Dickens and the Politics of the Family was published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, and she is currently working on her second book, Commodity Culture in Dickens s Household Words, for Ashgate s Nineteenth Century series. She is co-editor of the Australasian Victorian Studies Journal. Ian Wilkinson teaches Dickens and Wilkie Collins courses at Keele University. His main research interests lie in the areas of early Dickens, and the transition between Romanticism and Victorianism. He has published several articles on Dickens s earliest writings in such journals as Dickens Quarterly and Dickens Studies Annual, and is currently researching a chapter for Blackwell s A Companion to Dickens.