Journeys through nature: Dickens, anti-pastoralism and the country

Olson, Greta. “Dickens’s Animals through the Lenses of Poverty Studies and Posthumanism.” Dickens's Signs, Readers' Designs: New Bearings in Dickens Criticism. Eds. Norbert Lennartz and Francesca Orestano. Rome: Aracne, 2012. 281-303.

Dickens Studies Annual, 2018

In his 1843 novel, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens used the pastoral mode to deliver a strong message about labor. To communicate this message, he employed the mode's many traits, including its retreat into and return from the rural landscape and its focus on the country worker, traditionally the shepherd. This essay follows the novel's pastoral retreat into the United States, where young Martin comes to understand the realities of manual labor through his physical interactions with the American landscape. His companion, Mark Tapley, meanwhile, performs the emotional labor of the servant by initially shielding middle-class Martin from this painful knowledge. Both men, however, must confront manual labor on a massive scale upon reaching " Eden, " a hideous landscape that Dickens constructed referring to passages from his travelogue about his 1842 trip to the United States, American Notes. The landscape in Eden documents the decaying atmosphere of slavery as recorded in Dickens's trav-elogue. It also recreates for Martin the physical experience that Dickens had as a child of entering a vast, foreign world of factory work. Ultimately, Dickens's uses the pastoral to uncover a horror that usually lies beneath a beautiful surface: that the civilized landscape demands enslaved or nearly enslaved labor for its construction.

Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Cul, 2018

In the article ironically entitled A Monument of French Folly, published in Household Words, 8 th of March, 1851, Charles Dickens targeted a number of civic reforms in municipal abattoirs located within the city walls of London as well as the English arrogant reluctance to adopt the hygienic measures practiced in French slaughterhouses. Dickens's article was part of the foregoing struggle to relocate the Smithfield livestock market and surrounding slaughterhouses from the City of London in the city outskirts, so as to prevent ventilation problems and the risk of miasmic infection. The aim of this paper is to examine Dickens's article in the light of contemporary environmental concerns. I will particularly focus on his journalism as a token of modern social-ecology and environmental ethics, as shown by the administration and government policies he suggests to be implemented.

Dickens Studies Annual, 2022

This article is a comprehensive listing, alphabetically, first by title and then by author-contributor, of all the essays that have appeared in Dickens Studies Annual over the last fifty years.

Dickens and the Virtual City: Urban Perception and the Production of Social Space, 2017

This chapter analyses the railway and the river as two key conduits of Dickens's imaginary city, arguing that each simultaneously connects and fractures the modern urban world he depicts. Focusing on Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, the chapter explores how railway and river combine modernity with the primordial past, arguing that these are not separable but overlay and interpenetrate one another, forming a spatio-temporal palimpsest. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the essay proposes that these conduits are signs of a spatial or architectural unconscious which thrusts to the surface the ruination that the city tries to repress. Through this drawing together of new and old, known and unknown, railway and river come to embody Dickens's vision of modernity.

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2003

As an acute observer and critic of his age, Dickens reproduces in his writing the ubiquity of animals in the everyday lives of Victorians as raw material, labour, transport, food, clothing, entertainment, companionship, and objects of scientific knowledge. Over the past four decades, animal studies scholars have begun to think seriously about such questions as the permeability of the human/animal distinction, non-human agency, interspecies structures of feeling, the function of zoological language, and the materiality of animal lives in relation to situated knowledges and practices. Central to this project has been the ethical imperative of how we might think about animals as animals rather than simply as symbols or metaphors to explain human concerns. This chapter assesses Dickens’s representation of animals in the context of scholarship in both Victorian and human–animal studies, with a view to how such questions might initiate new lines of enquiry for future work in Dickens studies.

The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century

2015

Despite consumption and retailing having grown to form a meta-narrative in historical enquiry, the village shop has largely escaped attention. Remarkably little is known about the long-term development of rural services, particularly shops, which are often ignored as marginal and undynamic. Moreover, whilst their recent decline has highlighted their perceived importance to the vitality of village life, the extent to which this is based on a romanticised or historically myopic image is unclear. This thesis seeks to rectify this lacuna by critically assessing the real and imagined role of the shop and shopkeeper within village life during the nineteenth century, in terms of supplying goods and services, integrating and representing community as a place and a network of people, and projecting images of the rural into the wider national consciousness. It adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach and offers an integrated analysis of a wide range of visual, literary and historical s...

This essay is part of my continuing work on the spatial poetics of Dickens. Here I analyze the chronotopes of "Barnaby Rudge" and "A Tale of Two Cities" in relation to the problematic of violence.

Reality and Culture, 2014

2014

Animals appear in many guises in Charles Dickens’s novels, as wild animals, domestic animals, animals used in the service of humans, and, not least, as images and symbols. Based on a close reading ...

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2010

This short paper proposes toconsider the transition fromBleak House(1852–53) toLittle Dorrit(1856–57) as a phase of particular significance in Dickens's debate with himself over the claims, benefits, and pitfalls of national and wider forms of belonging. I elideHard Times(1854) because it seems to me that with the composition ofBleak HouseDickens had definitively arrived at the conviction that the twenty-number monthly novel was that one of his novelistic forms best suited to sustained exploration and testing of capacious social networks making claims upon individuals' identification and loyalty. InBleak House– as I have argued inDisorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels(2005) – Dickens responds to the false universalism of the Great Exhibition of 1851 by producing his most restrictively “national” of novels, programmatically and demonstratively shutting out a wider world in order to produce an image of Britain that negatively fores...

Dickens’s production abounds with descriptions of oneiric and semi-oneiric settings, so much so that it is possible to isolate and define a proper Dickensian dreamscape. This is a fictional environment located in an in-between zone on the verge of human consciousness, which presents specific qualities, such as temporal and spatial alteration, impaired perception and complete subjectivity. Dickens turned to fictional dreamscape not only as a tool to enrich his narratives but also as an invaluable means to understand and portray the Self and its relation to surrounding reality. Starting from the description of its recurrent features, it is possible to trace the evolutionary path that progressively turned the Dickensian dreamscape into a geographical space to explore and a metaphor for the labyrinth of inner reality. Although oneirism is a recurrent feature in Dickens’s articles, letters and novels, it is in his short pieces that the Dickensian dreamscape is best revealed, free from novelistic context and narrative accidents. Moreover, some of these pieces display great relevance when it comes to surveying Dickens’s attitude towards oneiric matter. By comparing three texts written at different times in Dickens’s career, such as “Early Coaches” (1836), “An Italian Dream” (1846) and “Night Walks” (1860), it is also possible to follow the stylistic, functional and psychological evolution of the Dickensian dreamscape from a literary device to a universally shared experience located within the inner Self.