Dickens and the 1830s by Kathryn Chittick

Abstract

This is a distinguished and wholly original contribution to the study of Forster. One might have wished for some contextualizing of his essayistic practice in its partial origins in the Cambridge tutorial essay and the Apostle paper; reference to the diaries might at moments illumine more brightly still some of the suggestions about The Commonplace Book’s concerns and styles; and it might be pertinent to indicate that certain essays originated as broadcast talks or as public lectures. But this is to ask for more (and different) fare when one is already surfeited. Herz’s study is a model of acute insight abetted by informed scholarship; its claims are balanced, its procedures elegant. She entirely convinces us that the dowdy old gentleman featured on the dust-jacket, engaged in reading and looking every bit the “back number” that William Plomer accused him of being, does indeed, as he himself insisted, back upon something worth noticing. j.h. stape / Concordia University Kathryn Chittick, Dickens and the 1830s (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1990). xiv, 208. $34.50 U.S. Dickens and the 1830s may, at first glance, seem an unpromising subject for a book, even one as modest in length as this one. The most dedicated Dickensian usually balks at Dickens’s complicated dealings with publishers in the early years of his writing career. His many agreements and contracts with Macrone, Bentley, and Chapman and Hall over who was to publish which sketch or magazine story or promised novel and in which form are a minefield that most critics would rather step gingerly over in their anxiety to reach the mature novels of the 1840s and 1850s. For literature in general the decade was singularly unpromising also, with the death of Sir Walter Scott in 1832 and the new crop of Victorian novelists still waiting in the wings, to emerge in the 1840s. Chittick quotes Gordon N. Ray, writing of Thackeray’s literary apprenticeship in these years: The 1830s were a painful interregnum in the history of English literature. The success of Byron in poetry and Scott in fiction had created a new mass reading public. When these great men died, they left behind them no obvious successors. Yet the appetite for print that they had aroused offered commercial opportunities too tempting to be ignored, and enterprising publishers were quick to take advantage of them. Thus a generation of naive and half-educated readers came to be exploited by a generation of business men who were hardly better trained. (97) 360 Dickens and the 1830s takes a thorough look at this “painful” decade (Chittick read over 1200 reviews in the course of her research) and sheds new and interesting light on Dickens’s development from a parliamentary reporter into a novelist by concentrating on the unusual literary milieu into which he was first launched as a periodical writer. Chittick describes how Dickens came to the writing of long narratives at a time when novels were considered not literature but “above all political entities, in their subject matter, in their audience, and in their publishing ephemerality” (40). Taking issue with critics who have seen Dickens’s devel­ opment into a novelist “retrospectively — that is to say, as inevitable” (9), Chittick demonstrates how Dickens’s progress from a parliamentary reporter to a sketch writer to a writer of serial fiction was shaped by financial need and by the refusal of contemporary reviewers to see Dickens’s writings as novels. The development of Pickwick Papers from text to accompany a series of sporting prints to a long, discursive narrative in the manner of Don Quixole is well known, but Chittick argues that none of Dickens’s works of the 1830s was really conceived as a novel, however much Dickens may have hankered after being a “novelist” rather than just a humorist or a magazine writer, as his contemporary reviewers continued to view him. Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal called Pickwick “a series of monthly pamphlets” (77) and the Sun called Oliver Twist “a clever series of articles” (81), which indeed it had been when it began in February 1837 as “Oliver Twist,” an article on the New Poor Law for Bentley’s Miscellany. Annoyed by...