Considering Dickens's relationship to the English Romantics, and to their poetry, this paper speculates on any possible relationship Dickens might have had with the work of William Blake, and tries to make the question more approachable by pondering Blake's relationship to Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's to Dickens. Triangulating the question thus, I think about Dickens and innocence, and about innocence in Blake and Wordsworth, and take my primary examples from Wordsworth's "We are Seven," and from Dickens and Nell, and eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, and the manifestation of these things in The Old Curiosity Shop. No positive account of influence can of course be given, but the paper hopes to make further inquiries about Dickens and (Romantic) innocence possible through its readings of texts.
Several novels of Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, who knew and respected each other, form intertextual sequences; much discussed, for instance, are their contrasting representations of the cityscape. The present paper deals with the implicit dialogue between Dickens's and Hugo's treatments of the topos of self-sacrifice for the sake of another person in the ambivalent representations of the French Revolution, in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and Hugo's Ninety-Three (1894). One of the features of this topos in the two novels is the figure of a dazed survivor, a person who, owing to the self-sacrifice of another, moves away from death, in a stunned condition, or in sleep or a swoon, and is left with a sense of guilt. This motif is prophetic; it would develop into a topos in its own right in twentieth-century literature.
This article expands on the existing understanding of the relationship between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, by examining the ways in which both novels utilize thematic concerns embedded within John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, particularly those that are derived from Milton's political position in relation to the prevailing indissolubility of marriage in England as set out in his treatises on divorce. It argues that both Shelley in her depiction of Frankenstein's creature and Dickens with the corpse-like Miss Havisham, incorporated Milton's likening of a failed marriage to the torture of Mezentius, where a living person was roped to a dead body, arguing that in doing so, each of these novels became a locus advocating for the Miltonic needful divorce, which would allow a divorce to relieve an ill-made marriage on the sole ground of the incompatibility between a husband and a wife.
Traditionally, Dickens's Sketches by Boz has been analyzed by scholars as exactly what it appears to be-distinct, individual works, each having their own separate thematic import and purpose. Alternatively, Sketches by Boz has often been read through the analytical "hobby-horses" of each individual scholar (e.g. "Sketches by Boz and Theater," "Sketches by Boz and Authorship," "Sketches by Boz and the Law," etc.). However, as insightful as these readings are, none of them gets to the heart of the work itself. Is it possible that a work with such a fragmented nature can have a central, unifying theme? I argue that it can, and that the theme running through the entirety of the Sketches is that of repeated failures of observation. These failures occur in every one of the fifty-six sketches, and can be categorized according to their type as "Perception," "Deception," and "Imitation."
This article argues that Dickens's unfinished final novel, The Mystery ofEdwin Drood, challenges the British Empire's fantasy of homogeneous Englishness through its portrayal of the racially hybrid twins from Ceylon, Neville and Helena Landless. Brought to England in the name of supplementary "education," the twins' colonial hybridity is strategically tamed and instrumentalized by the English residents of Cloisterham, reflecting the status of the mixed-race population in British Ceylon ("the Burghers"). When the male twin poses an epistemological threat to English society's idealized rhetoric of imperialism through his "border thinking," the twins' hybridity becomes criminalized, confined, and ultimately erased, leaving them perpetually "land-less." The novel's peculiarities in plot development and projected ending can be more effectively explained if readers take the Landlesses' mixed-race identity-and Dickens's potential awareness of such colonial hybridity-into consideration.
