Time-Travel in Dickens’ World

Abstract

A restless traveller and travel writer himself, Charles Dickens has done more than his share for commercial and literary travel. Memorials, pilgrimages, festivals and museums have crowded round Dickens with an almost Shakespearean intensity, in spite of his dying wish to have no memorial or monument¹ — and in spite of the absence of a unique, established shrine. The likeness of Dickens is amongst the most recognizable of any author’s, while he and his cast of characters seem to walk the earth from the Dickens Universe in Santa Cruz, California, to the Dickens Fellowship in Japan.² His persistence is both spatial and temporal. Specific locales have become ‘Dickens Country’ and thrive on literary tourism.³ More broadly, much of England’s past is ‘Dickensian,’ a heritage and homeland for the reader-citizen.⁴ On the one hand, he is tethered to solid objects and accessible places. Like other nineteenth-century novelists he has registered certain landmarks as the originals of fictional or biographical settings. On the other hand, he is diffused as an adjectival association of ideas of Victorian England. How does an author become both materialized and abstracted as a sort of ubiquitous historical anachronism? In this brief essay I feature certain forms of Dickensian reception associated with objects, houses, and places as well as performances. I wish to bring out the dimensions of time travel in ‘homes and haunts’ literature and literary tourism, waiving for the moment the distinctions amongst the interrelated pursuits of experts, journalists and tourists. In practice, a mix of these approaches guided my observations during recent visits to the Dickens Museum in London, the Dickens Festival in Rochester, and Dickens World in Chatham.