ABSTRACT In this interview with a senior Victorianist, Robert L. Patten, Professor Emeritus of Humanities at Rice University, reflects on his life and works and the founding of the Dickens Society in 1970. He comments on trends in Dickens scholarship and directions for future studies.
Minor characters in Charles Dickens's novels are often, in the words of Audrey Jaffe, "marked." When this distinction of character is seen in a character with a disabled body, they are preternaturally able to create a group around them that Talia Schaffer has termed a "community of care." This can be seen by focusing on the communities surrounding the Marchioness in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Jenny Wren in Our Mutual Friend (1865). The Marchioness attempts to find community through a marital dyad with Richard "Dick" Swiveller, while Jenny Wren finds a wider group of people with whom she can form mutually beneficial relationships. This article explores the impact these two forms of care communities have on marked, disabled female characters, and how Dickens realized the typical marriage plot might not be as effective in providing the care these characters required as he originally believed.
This article argues that S & oslash;ren Kierkegaard and Charles Dickens each identified and responded to the same social problem, called "leveling," or the suppression of the individual in an inert post-revolutionary age. Kierkegaard analyzes the spiritual dangers of this abstracting force in Two Ages (1846), while Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853) dramatizes a dialectic between mass society and the individual, which both exposes the empty reflections of a leveled society and, in Esther's narration, intimates an escape route. In addition to glossing a conceptual history of "leveling," this article advances a model for Victorian realism that disavows psychological interiority to guard instead the inmost self against reductive social abstraction.
In the 1940s and early 1950s, three establishment critics, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and George Orwell, each independently wrote essays championing the relevance of Dickens for their own time, an age of intense political conflict. Why? What seems most likely is that they were drawn to Dickens out of a feeling of political partisanship, of kindred-spiritedness. As much as some may strive for objective standards by which to judge literature, artistic tastes and inclinations are shaped, bent, and sometimes broken by current affairs and the times people live in. This article is a personal meditation on the value of reading a classic writer such as Dickens during times of social and political instability.
In Dickens Studies, the year 2024 is marked by interest in (1) Dickens's lifelong appreciation for, contribution to, and utilization of the arts; (2) his traveling activities, whether undertaken within his native England, Great Britain, Europe, and North America or experienced in the imagination; (3) the identities and responses of his reading publics, those absorbing, engaging with, and even resisting his literary messages and persona during his active career, and ever since, a topic also provoking urgent considerations of how we do and can read Dickens's dominant cultural works in thoughtful conversation with texts from other cultures; (4) calls in this digital era to fulfill the twentieth-century dream of globalizing Dickens studies, transcending linguistic barriers and traditional centering of scholarship from the Northern Hemisphere; and (5) exploration of Dickens's evocative powers over Victorian infrastructures and atmospheres, altering the properties of matter, rendering elements symbolic, and exploiting tragedy and comedy in their many cultural aspects to create an unforgettable Dickensian affect, resurrected in Neo-Victorian homages, that can illustrate stark social truths.
