Parentage And Inheritance In The Novels Of Charles Dickens

Dickens's plots and the process of succession, based on the inheritance of looks, name and property.

The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick's Vision explores in radically different ways from most approaches to nineteenth-century studies the tropes and metaphors of vision in Dickens' first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Julian Wolfreys provides a close reading of Dickens' Pickwick Papers and argues that this novel is an exemplary text for the re-consideration of concepts such as literature, history, the novel, and the whole notion of Victorian studies. True to the purpose of the Victorian Critical Interventions Series, Wolfreys challenges scholars to rethink the use of a canonical text in Victorian literature. Challenging the commonplaces of historicist criticism, and demonstrating the need for a return to close reading, The Old Story, with a Difference presents a reading of the novel grounded in the twinned rigors of materialist historiography and theoretical inflections tending toward attentiveness to epistemological and linguistic concerns. Through such an orientation, Wolfreys unpacks the relation between the tropes of visuality and matters of memory, history, and the necessity of fiction to bear witness to the cultures, past and present, from which literature becomes generated and which it mediates. In doing so, he situates an argument for rethinking Dickens' novel as the inaugural novel of Victorian fiction par excellence, in that novel's efforts to remain open to the traces of the past in particular ways. The Old Story, with a Difference holds profound implications for the study not only of Dickens' works but Victorian literature and culture in general. Provocative and inventive, this ambitious analysis will challenge, goad, and invite the reader to return to acts of materialist reading informed by ethical and ideological urgency, rather than relapsing into the commonplaces of humanist cliché.

How key changes to the married women's property laws contributed to new ways of viewing women in society are revealed in Deborah Wynne's study of literary representations of women and portable property during the period 1850 to 1900. While critical explorations of Victorian women's connections to the material world have tended to focus on their relationships to commodity culture, Wynne argues that modern paradigms of consumerism cannot be applied across the board to the Victorian period. Until the passing of the 1882 Married Women's Property Act, many women lacked full property rights; evidence suggests that, for women, objects often functioned not as disposable consumer products but as cherished personal property. Focusing particularly on representations of women and material culture in Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Wynne shows how novelists engaged with the vexed question of women's relationships to property. Suggesting that many of the apparently insignificant items that 'clutter' the Victorian realist novel take on new meaning when viewed through the lens of women's access to material culture and the vagaries of property law, her study opens up new possibilities for interpreting female characters in Victorian fiction and reveals the complex work of 'thing culture' in literary texts.

The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe offers a full historical survey of Dickens's reception in all the major European countries and many of the smaller ones, filling a major gap in Dickens scholarship, which has by and large neglected Dickens's fortunes in Europe, and his impact on major European authors and movements. Essays by leading international critics and translators give full attention to cultural changes and fashions, such as the decline of Dickens's fortunes at the end of the nineteenth century in the period of Naturalism and Aestheticism, and the subsequent upswing in the period of Modernism, in part as a consequence of the rise of film in the era of Chaplin and Eisenstein. It will also offer accounts of Dickens's reception in periods of political upheaval and revolution such as during the communist era in Eastern Europe or under fascism in Germany and Italy in particular.

This study discusses every phase of Dickens' development within his fiction, while particular attention is paid to those writings which fall into the category of first person narrative. It is through the use of the first person in novels, letters and travel writings that Dickens reveals a good deal, not only about his own identity, but also about the construction of Victorian subjectivity in general. The overriding focus of the analysis in this book is a literary one, although it includes a series of reflections on aspects of Victorian society and culture: prisons, schools, money, poverty, fallen women, orphans, detectives and The Great Exhibition.

This study focuses on Dickens's response to questions of identity, conduct, and social organization that emerged in an era of major cultural unsettlement and change, not least with the decline of religious certainty and the rise of materialism. An analysis of A Christmas Carol as a paradigm of his concerns and strategies in these fields is followed by close readings of novels from different stages of his career, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. These, and other works by Dickens, are seen to reflect ideologies currently at work in his society but also, more importantly, to participate in the construction of needful value systems and codes for regulating behaviour. Liberal humanism and middle-class hegemony feature largely in this process of culture formation, where Dickens played a crucial role in formulating and promulgating such salient guiding principles as those of sympathy, marriage and the family, economic responsibility, and hierarchy within and between groups. His treatment of the self is on one level driven by this project in shaping and stabilizing attitudes among a confederacy of readers, in that it offers positive models of development, of how to function and fit in; yet on another, especially in his sustained imaginative preoccupation with the figure of the outsider or misfit, this is one pre-eminent area where his writing transcends purposes of enculturation and paradoxically challenges its own ideological positions. His female characters in particular, as well as more obviously his anti-heroes, criminals, and other dissidents, are shown to question and subvert the moulds in which they are formally cast. The novels are confirmed not only as great creative achievements, an aspect this book consistently salutes, nor simply as a primary site of the evolving Victorian dispensation and revolution of ideas, but as a territory that predicts, engages, and illuminates our own complex modernity. Reference is made throughout the volume to other contemporary writings, including sociological, philosophic, and medical discourse, to recent cognate theory, and to traditions, like that of Puritan spiritual autobiography, which Dickens adapted to new ends.

The Edinburgh Companion to Charles Dickens and the Arts explores Dickens's rich and complex relationships with a myriad of art forms and the far-reaching resonance of his works across the arts overall. This volume reassesses Dickens's prescient philosophy of art, both through a historical and a present-day lens and in the context of debates about the cultural value of the arts. Across thirty-three original essays, it outlines the ways in which Dickens broke down oppositions between high and low art, money and the aesthetic, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and art for its own sake and the social good. In doing so, it considers how Dickens prefigured the arts of the future, including rap music, television, fanfiction and global cinema.

Dickens is second only to Shakespeare in the range and intensity of critical discussion which his work has provoked. His writing is central to literature and culture across the English-speaking world. In this important new anthology, Steven Connor gathers together representative examples of the range of new critical approaches to Dickens over the last two decades.