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The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens pp 85–142Cite as

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Time

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Abstract

This chapter examines notions of time and their practical and psychological impact upon human life, in poems by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Byron. The schism that John Stuart Mill identified as central to the thought and culture of his time, in his essays on Bentham and Coleridge, is epitomized by the struggle between urban, increasingly standardized, mechanical time, and the natural rhythms of light and darkness, and the seasons, that regulate rural, preindustrial time. This struggle for time is a central theme of A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens’s treatment of the theme appropriates and develops the Romantics’ notions about the importance of this struggle. The role of water imagery, common to all these writers’ explorations of the theme, is also analyzed.

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  1. Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

    Peter Cook

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Cook, P. (2018). Time. In: The Romantic Legacy of Charles Dickens. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96791-2_3

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