Despatched to the Periphery: the Changing Play of Centre and Periphery in Dickens’s Work

Abstract

The ‘world system’ of Empire and informal Empire impinges continually on Dickens’s works. An exquisitely droll vignette is that of Herbert Pocket in such despondency with the results of his looking about him ‘as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune’ (34.293).¹ The moment one’s smile fades at the absurd notion of Pocket as the great white hunter, smudgy implications surface. The middle-class fantasy of achieving wealth without real work depends upon displacing the actual making of the fortune onto the buffalo (a structure of thought which could equally accommodate slaves or natives); exploitation is disguised as a test of manhood; and the violence of the envisaged ‘compelling’ is naturalised by the humour, and by the convenient assumption that the periphery is empty of all but natural resources. For, as Micawber says grandly of the ‘fatal shore’ to which he is bound, unwittingly pronouncing on the 20,000 aborigines killed in clashes, the denizens of the forest cannot… expect to participate in the refinements of the land of the Free’ (57.876).²