Abstract
Dickens’s writing has been a trouble as well as a pleasure ever since it began, and successive critics, methods, systems, and theories have often found themselves bemused or defeated by its force and strange demands. It is not, of course, that Dickens is a difficult writer, like Mallarmé or Ezra Pound. Millions of readers, of all ages, classes, and nationalities, have testified to the pleasure they get from his work. But it is not easy to say why Dickens’s work is so exceptionally powerful. It presents challenges of the most interesting kind to our ideas about writing and aesthetic value. In this chapter I would like to ask what are the distinctive qualities of Dickens’s writing and how it might be best to describe them. It is called “Dickens and the Force of Writing” because one of the most common experiences of reading Dickens is that of an extraordinary force. But it should really be called “the forces of writing,” because there is nothing singular or undivided in the force we experience in reading his work.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, ed. Paul Schlicke, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), ch. 32, pp. 408–9.
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), pp. 227–48.
See, for example, Robert Garis, The Dickens Theatre: A Reassessment of the Novels (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).
William Wordsworth, Letter to Lady Beaumont, 21 May 1807 in Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part One 1806–11, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 150.
William Empson, Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 489.
F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 21.
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, ed. J. W. T. Ley (London: Cecil Palmer, 1928), p. 8.
George Santayana, “Dickens,” The Dial, 71 (1921): 537–49, reprinted in Soliloquies in England (London: Constable, 1922); on Karl Marx and Dickens, see S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 174. See also Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (New York: International General, 1974), p. 106. T. W. Adorno, “On Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop: A lecture,” in Notes to Literature 2 vols. (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:170; Martha Nussbaum, “Steerforth’s Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 335–65, and Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 145–50; on Wittgenstein’s admiration for Dickens, see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty ofGenius (London: Vintage, 1991), p. 569.
John Stuart MIII, from a letter to Harriet laylor, 20 March 1854, in Philip Collins, ed., Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, pp. 297–8.
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Kathleen Tillotson, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 4, p. 31.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Paul Schlicke, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989) ch. 15, p. 127.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Genealogy of Morals,” in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 116–18. See also Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, Dickens,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 68.
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. Peter Harvey Sucksmith, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 63, p. 612.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 49.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, ed. Alan Horsman, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 15, pp. 225–6.
George Henry Lewes, “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” Fortnightly Review (February 1872): 141–54, reprinted in George H. Ford and Lauriat Lane Jr., eds., The Dickens Critics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961), p. 69.
See, for example, Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 77–9.
Violet Wyndham, The Sphinx and her Circle: A Biographical Sketch of Ada Leverson, 1862–1933 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963), p. 119.
Thomas Carlyle, “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” in CritTcal and Miscellaneous Essays Volume One (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), p. 17 (emphasis added).
George Steiner, “Aspects of Counter Revolution,” in The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution and its Legacy, ed. Geoffrey Best (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 135.
Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man in A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings, ed. Michael Slater (London: Penguin, 2003).
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny: An Introduction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).
George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters Volume One: An Age Like This 1920–40 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). Vladimir Nabokov, “Bleak House (1852–3),” in Fredson Bowers, ed., Lectures on Literature (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980), pp. 62–124. G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens (London: Methuen, 1906); G. K. Chesterton, Chesterton on Dickens (London: Methuen, 1992). W. H. Auden, “Dingley Dell and the Fleet,” in The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 407–28. J. Hillis Miller, Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958); J. Hillis Miller, Victorian Subjects (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991); J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 105–33. J. Hillis Miller, Illustration (London: Reaktion, 1992), pp. 96–111. J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 158–77.
There are eleven references to Dickens in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Belknap: Harvard University Press, 1999) but, with one possible exception, these are all taken from secondary sources, the majority (seven) from a French translation of Chesterton’s Charles Dickens.
See Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); Valerie Browne Lester, Phiz: The Man who Drew Dickens (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004); Robert L. Patten, George Cruikshank’s Life, Times and Art Volume 2 1835–1878 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1996); Lillian Nayder, Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), and Anthea Trodd “Collaborating in Open Boats: Dickens, Collins, Franklin, and Bligh,” Victorian Studies 42, 2(Winter 1999–2000): 201–25.
Deborah A. Thomas, Dickens and the Short Story (London: Batsford, 1982), p. 80.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), ch. 47, p. 677.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2006 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bowen, J. (2006). Dickens and the Force of Writing. In: Bowen, J., Patten, R.I. (eds) Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies. Palgrave Advances. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524200_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524200_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-1286-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-52420-0
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)