Abstract
Compared to, say, Keats or the Carlyles, Dickens was not a great letter-writer; where in Dickens’s correspondence, we might ask, are phrases to rival the former and pen-portraits the latter? But, though there may be questions about quality, there can be none about quantity: over 13 000 of his letters have survived, a total that few great novelists can match. More than any other form of writing the letter is shaped to fit the needs of its reader; it is at once the most personal, self-conscious and readerly kind of literature. Letter-writing on the Dickensian scale ensured that authorial role-playing, the main consequence of acute reader-awareness, was a daily activity, an influential adjunct to the writing of fiction.
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Notes
Quotations are from The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edition, Vol. I, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965)
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edition, Vol. II, ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Quotations are from Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (Harmond-sworth: Penguin Books, 1971; reprinted 1980).
Leigh Hunt, Selected Essays (London: Dent, 1929), pp. 339, 341.
M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 6.
Quotations are from Pictures from Italy, ed. David Paroissien (London: André Deutsch, 1973).
The Letters of Charles Dickens, Pilgrim edition, Vol. III, ed. Madeline House, Graham Storey and Kathleen Tillotson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 587.
M. Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 446.
J. Carey, The Violent Effigy (London: Faber & Faber, 1973), p. 152.
A. Wilson, The World of Charles Dickens (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 184ff.
W. Burgam, ‘Little Dorrit in Italy, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XXIX (1974–5), 393–411.
F. Kaplan, Dickens and Mesmerism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 216ff.
Quotations are from The Christmas Books, Vol. I, ed. Michael Slater (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971; reprinted 1976).
The coloured illustrations and the woodcuts, superbly reproduced, are most conveniently found in Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol: a facsimile of the manuscript in The Pierpont Morgan Library (New York: James H. Heineman, 1967).
R. Browning, Poetical Works 1833–1864, ed. Ian Jack (London: Oxford University Press, 1970; reprinted 1975), pp. 645, 568, 373.
A. Sinfield, Dramatic Monologue (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 7.
G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906), p. 170.
E. Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph, Revised & Abridged edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 256.
C. Dickens, Selected Short Fiction, ed. Deborah A. Thomas (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 23.
G. Holderness, ‘Imagination in A Christmas Carol’, Études Anglaises, XXX (1979), p. 40.
Quotations are from Bleak House, ed. Norman Page (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971; reprinted 1980).
R. Donovan, ‘Structure and Idea in Bleak House’, ELH, XXIX (1962), 175–201.
K. Flint, Dickens (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1986), p. 53.
CA. Senf, ‘Bleak House Dickens, Esther, and the Androgynous Mind’, The Victorian Newsletter, No. 64 (Fall, 1983), 21–7.
Quotations are from Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder (Harmond-sworth: Penguin Books, 1965; reprinted 1985).
R.B. Partlow, Jr., ‘The Moving I: A Study of the Point of View in Great Expectations’; Hard Times, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend: A Casebook, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 119.
John O. Jordan, The Medium of Great Expectations’, Dickens Studies Annual, II (1983), 78.
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© 1989 James A. Davies
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Davies, J.A. (1989). Narrators. In: The Textual Life of Dickens’s Characters. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08582-8_3
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