Dickens After Dickens ed. by Emily Bell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dickens After Dickens ed. by Emily Bell Valerie Purton (bio) Emily Bell, editor. Dickens After Dickens. White Rose UP, 2020. Open access. doi.org/10.22599. ISBN 978-1-912482-22-1 (ebook). Dr. Emily Bell's collection of papers from her 2016 "After Dickens" conference at the University of York has become in book form "Dickens After Dickens" and the change encapsulates one of the paradoxes of the enterprise. The book's epigraph from G. K. Chesterton, "We have a long way to travel before we get back to what Dickens meant"(1), already suggests, as Bell points out, a two-way process: Dickens lies in our future as well as in our past. Bell seems to be intent on capturing a sense of the constant to-and-fro movement in Dickens studies between the Life and the After-Life. The contrast between "Dickens in our past" and "Dickens in our future" is therefore addressed in a variety of ways in this collection of eleven essays: the more historically-based chapters deal with Dickens's direct influence, in the traditional sense of exploring how he changed the world around him. A striking example is the excellent chapter by Joanna Hofer-Robinson which tracks the transformation of Jacob's Island in London as the result of Dickens's description in Oliver Twist. At the other extreme is the Neo-Victorian approach, in which rereading Victorian fiction results in contemporary rewriting, rewriting absorbed in its own time, in which "Dickens" is merely a cultural marker rather than a goal. Rob Jacklosky's chapter on Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch describes Tartt's appropriation of Dickens in this way. In Tartt's novel, being true to the original does not figure: getting back to what Dickens meant is not the aim. What matters are contemporary concerns. "Dickens" transmogrifies into whatever form is relevant to twenty-first century readers. Juliet John's Foreword astutely shows that this approach was adumbrated decades before it became widely recognized. In the 1990s, she points out, "[Robin] Gilmour and [John] Sutherland were the first to draw attention to what we now call neo-Victorianism" and to explore "the creative tension and mutuality between past and present "(x). The chapters in this volume unite in revealing the sheer omnipresence of both the biographical Dickens (the first approach) and "Dickens" (the second) [End Page 341] in our culture. The word "Dickens" never appears in scare quotes in this book, but simply in different typefaces and, on the cover, visually, in a witty move from a sepia photograph (the biographical Dickens) to a slash through with colored pixilations to suggest twenty-first century "Dickens"es. There is, sadly, no room for a direct discussion of the concept of "Global Dickens," although most of the chapters offer unwitting testimony to the strength of that idea which, as John says, is "perhaps the most dynamic area of Dickens studies in the twenty-first century" (viii). Of the chapters dealing with Dickens's direct influence, the Jacob's Island chapter and Michael Eaton's wonderfully rumbustious account of his own attempts to adapt Great Expectations stand out. The latter suggests, in a wistfully Chestertonian way, the pre-eminence of the Master: "The company who have become so close now disperse, perhaps never to meet again. Yet another piece of theatre has been written on water. Yet another version of Dickens's masterpiece has become a thing of memory, while the original continues to live forever"(193). A surprisingly similar conclusion is reached by Rob Jacklosky in his analysis of Tartt's Neo-Victorian novel. Though he enjoys and admires Tartt's work, he concludes: "What is lacking–the mixture of pathos and humour, the insistent charming narrator, the warmth, the texture, the 'crooked capricious' lived moments–is perhaps, after all, inimitable" (133). A surprising number of the chapters, in fact, do return in the end to Chesterton's original question of "what Dickens meant." Dickens After Dickens is, as Emily Bell explains in her Introduction, "a series of case studies" (5) and it is all the better for that, in that each chapter is grounded in close reading rather than theoretical...