Introduction: the Dickens Phenomenon and the Dickens Industry

Abstract

The compulsively repeated writing out of an inexpressible private trauma, or a sustained, ‘graphic and eloquent’ engagement with the social, political and moral realities of his day? These are just two of the myriad ways of reading the formidable literary production of Charles Dickens. To many of his contemporaries Dickens was ‘emphatically the novelist of his age’, in whose novels ‘posterity will read, more clearly than in any contemporary records, the character of our nineteenth century life’.¹ At the same time he was also ‘the great magician of our time’, whose ‘wand is a book’.² By the early twentieth century, Virginia Woolf, who sought in her own modernist experimentation to escape from what she saw as the yoke of the form of the novel created by Dickens and his contemporaries, could take Dickens for granted, as ‘everybody’s writer and no one’s in particular’, an ‘institution, a monument, a public thoroughfare trodden dusty by a million feet’.³ Woolf’s contemporary, John Middleton Murry, on the other hand, found Dickens a challengingly ‘baffling figure’, whose ‘chief purpose in writing’ sometimes appears to be ‘to put a spoke in the wheel of our literary aesthetics’, but one whose work has a ‘curious trick of immortality’ despite the fact that it cannot be contained within accepted canons of value.⁴ One of Dickens’s most recent re-readers has delighted in the challenge that this author’s work poses to our turn-of-the-twenty-first-century aesthetics, and to the ways in which we usually subdivide the cultural field, and understand the human subject and fictional character, and even the processes of history.⁵

No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I … felt my early hopes of growing up to be a learned and distinguished man crushed in my breast. The deep remembrance … of the misery it was to my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned and thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and emulation up by, was passing away from me … cannot be written.

(Charles Dickens, on his experience of being put to work in Warren’s Blacking Factory at the age of twelve, in ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, Life, I: 22)

[Dickens’s] graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists, and moralists put together.

(Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels, quoted in Peter Demetz, Marx, Engels and the Poets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 45