Charles Dickens traveled to North America twice, in 1842 and twenty-five years later in 1867--68, and on both trips Massachusetts was part of his itinerary. Although many aspects of his U.S. travels ...disappointed him, Massachusetts was the one state that met and even exceeded Dickens's expectations for "the republic of his imagination." From the mills of Lowell to the Perkins School for the Blind, it offered an alternate vision of America that influenced his future writings, while the deep and lasting friendships he formed with Bostonians gave him enduring ties to the commonwealth.
This volume provides insight from leading scholars who have begun to reassess the significance of Massachusetts in the author's life and work. The collection begins with a broad biographical and historical overview taken from the full-length narrative of the award-winning exhibition Dickens and Massachusetts: A Tale of Power and Transformation, which attracted thousands of visitors while on display in Lowell. Abundant images from the exhibition, many of them difficult to find elsewhere, enhance the story of Dickens's relationship with the vibrant cultural and intellectual life of Massachusetts. The second section includes essays that consider the importance of Dickens's many connections to the commonwealth.
In addition to the volume editors, contributors include Chelsea Bray, Iain Crawford, Andre DeCuir, Natalie McKnight, Lillian Nayder, and Kit Polga.
Holcroft says that a number of apprehended rioters "were ordered to Newgate, whither they were escorted by a party of the Guards" (25); Dickens uses similar language in the final paragraph of chapter ...49, where the narrator notes that "a body of Horse Guards" were escorting ... some rioters whom they had made prisoners, to Newgate (224). In chapter 66, Dickens follows this source very carefully, noting the loss of gallery a beautiful ... of pictures, and the rarest collection of manuscripts ever possessed by any one private because nothing could replace this loss, person in the world, and worse than all, the great Law Library were s ... on almost every page of which ... note in the Judge's own hand, of inestimable value - (323) In his revisions of this passage, Dickens substitutes "gallery" for Holcroft's word "collection," and cancels the phrase "with all the notes," taken closely from Holcroft; he retains the phrase "any private person in the world," adding, however, the redundant word "one" after "any." First of all, Dickens was writing fiction: historical fiction, but fiction nevertheless. ...perhaps more importantly, Dickens wanted to put his own impress on the materials.
A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel almost obsessed with doubles and doubling. Dickens’s rhetoric in the novel is full of doubles, as is his imagery: mirrors, reflections, and echoes pervade the ...novel. The most obvious doubling—and perhaps the most important doubling in terms of plot—is the doubling of the central characters Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. The physical similarity between these two young men allows Darnay to be released from mortal jeopardy in each of the two cities mentioned in Dickens’s title, most thrillingly in the novel’s final chapters. But my concern here is not with Darnay, but with Sydney Carton’s other doubles in A Tale of Two Cities. Utilizing close examination of the revisions in Dickens’s remarkable manuscript of the novel (now in the Forster Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), I consider several other figures that double Carton: Mr. Stryver, the ‘lion’ to Sydney’s ‘jackal’; Charles Dickens, Carton’s own creator; the innocent young seamstress who shares his fate at the guillotine in the final chapter; and finally—and perhaps most revealingly—Sydney Carton himself.
DICK SWIVELLER'S BED BRATTIN, JOEL J.
Dickens quarterly,
09/2009, Letnik:
26, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Dick Swiveller, an imaginative young man steeped in popular poetry, melodrama, and (at times) gin, has a peculiar bedstead, described in chapter seven of The Old Curiosity Shop: it is a "deceptive ...piece of furniture, in reality a bedstead, but in semblance a bookcase," and it occupies "a prominent situation in his chamber and seems to defy suspicion and challenge inquiry." Dick does not believe his "one glass of cold gin-and-water" is really rosy wine, to cite another example drawn from the same page as the description of his curious bedstead, nor does he believe the grubby tittle servant who serves the Brasses is really a "Marchioness," but it makes life "seem more real and pleasant" for Dick, and for others including ourselves, when Dick thus seasons his experience with his poetic imagination (2.120; ch. 57). Here, the dual-purpose bedstead is associated in young Dickens's mind with both extreme poverty and his father's unique type of Micawberesque creativity.1 In "Brokers and Marine-Store Shops," first published in the Morning Chronicle on 15 December 1834, Boz describes two different types of beds that masquerade as other articles of furniture. The little girl on whom Dick bestows the affectionate sobriquet "The Marchioness" is capable, like Swiveller, of achieving remarkable imaginative transformations of reality: she tells Dick that she used to come out at night to forage for leftover bits of biscuit, "or even pieces of orange peel to put into cold water and make believe it was wine.
Bleak House Brattin, Joel J
Dickens quarterly,
12/2011, Letnik:
28, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ingham's introduction attempts to give a kind of overview of the social and literary context of the novel, and to touch on some of Dickens's key themes, techniques, and characters. In a consideration ...of the literary context of Bleak House, Ingham identifies two types of Victorian social novels, "those of the pre- 1840s ... and those of the post- 1840s" (19), offering Frances Trollope's Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Helen Fleetwood, and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton and Charlotte Bronte's Shirley as two examples of each type - but the four novels she mentions were originally published in 1840, 1841, 1848, and 1849, and thus belong to neither category. In her interpretation of the novel, Ingham feels that "Judgement, Equity, and Circle" are the "Key Terms in the Novel' (28), and indeed they are important, but are they more so than, say, love, duty, family, or identity? The next 53 pages are devoted to another six appendices: ten excerpts revealing contemporary reactions to the novel, fifteen excerpts treating the role and status of women, eight excerpts discussing the court of Chancery, five excerpts treating attitudes to religious and other proselytizing, four excerpts about class inequality, and eleven excerpts about the living conditions of the working classes.
Sixteen scholars from across the globe come together in Charles Dickens as Agent of Change to show how Dickens was (and still is) the consummate change agent. His works, bursting with restless energy ...in the Inimitable's protean style, registered and commented on the ongoing changes in the Victorian world while the Victorians' fictional and factional worlds kept (and keep) changing. The essays from notable Dickens scholars-Malcolm Andrews, Matthias Bauer, Joel J. Brattin, Doris Feldmann, Herbert Foltinek, Robert Heaman, Michael Hollington, Bert Hornback, Norbert Lennartz, Chris Louttit, Jerome Meckier, Nancy Aycock Metz, David Paroissien, Christopher Pittard, and Robert Tracy-suggest the many ways in which the notion of change has found entry into and is negotiated in Dickens' works through four aspects: social change, political and ideological change, literary change, and cultural change. An afterword by the late Edgar Rosenberg adds a personal account of how Dickens changed the life of one eminent Dickensian.
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