Dickens and the Anatomy of Evil: Sesquicentennial Essays ed. by Mitsuharu Matsuoka

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dickens and the Anatomy of Evil: Sesquicentennial Essays ed. by Mitsuharu Matsuoka Jen Baker (bio) Mitsuharu Matsuoka, editor.Dickens and the Anatomy of Evil: Sesquicentennial Essays. Athena Press, 2020. Pp. xiv + 366. ¥3,636. ISBN: 9784863403376 (hb). Setting the scene of this project commemorating 150 years since Dickens’s death, the editor notes that, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, it almost did not make its deadline. Yet, in true tribute to Dickens’s own strict adherence to deadlines, the collection was successfully published (in even greater tribute) on Christmas day of 2020. The influence for the work, as Paul Schlicke identifies in his Introduction to this edited collection, is that “[a]mong Dickens’s firmly held beliefs is the conviction of the existence of evil” (2), and each of the twenty essays anatomizes the “various kinds of evil” (ix) at play, focusing on one of Dickens’s major works, roughly in chronological order of publication. Schlicke frames the collection according to what he argues Dickens saw as the primary evils–murder and the abuse of children. As well as the thorough and solemn evil of murderers and abusers like Sikes and Murdstone, there are the “comically grotesque figures,” taking on “allegorical status more powerful than any realism” (4). Tomoya Watanabe identifies Jonas Chuzzlewit as such as character, while Mark Weeks shows another function of the comic grotesque through an examination of affective laughter in Pickwick Papers, seeing overflowing embodied experiences and energies in the novel as an antidote to “the evil seen to be inflicted upon bodies by the law” (26). Unique in Dickens’s works, suggests Schlicke, is an evil showcased in The Haunted Man–a type that is not an “active ingredient” but the “negation of goodness” that comes with the removal of memories which create positive qualities such as empathy (5, 6). Yet, almost conversely, suggests Yasuhiko Matsumoto of Dickens’s unfinished Edwin Drood, the constant access to imagination Jasper possesses, and to which the reader is partly privy, “presents an uncomfortable possibility that imagination, often regarded as a foundation for empathy, can serve evilness” (365). The private, rather than public, setting of The Haunted Man is expounded in Hiroshi Enomoto’s analysis of the Christmas books, where he suggests that, “[r]ather than taking social evils at face value,” Dickens “addresses them as [End Page 251] private experiences in order to make his writing resonate with a wider range of people” (167). Expanding on the cast of specific “evil” types of character, both Keiko Kiriyama and Sari Nishigaki separately explore how James Harthouse of Hard Times and Compeyson of Great Expectations, respectively, are evil dandified figures, each of whom “succeeds in concealing his true character” through his good and gentlemanly looks ([Nishigaki] 318). Each author charts the breakdown of their character’s “chain of evil”–the former owing to an innocent antithesis, the latter through a more complex thread of forgiveness and consolation. Mitsuharu Matsuoka offers an alternative focus by considering how the wider material and economic context of postal anonymity had positive aspects for customers, but “also caused maladies or evil effects, including […] the promotion of valueless products, defrauding recipients, blackmailing for money, and threatening to reveal dark secrets” (244), in Bleak House. Yet, what many of the essays in the collection essentially argue is that there are characters, narrative and generic tensions, topographical descriptions through which the reader is “led to doubt” the “indisputability” of the otherwise “clear demarcation between Good and Evil,” and the unstable or inconsistent aspects “shake and endanger the seemingly unassailable distinction” (44). For Mio Hatada, even with positive guardianship in Oliver Twist, the child figure is nevertheless shown to be both “promise and threat” and this strongly suggests “that the seemingly innocent and good Oliver might prove no exception to this dual-sidedness” and can be viewed as “the source of the collapse” between good and evil (47, 58). Similarly, Keiko Inokuma suggests that “behind various episodes that reveal his immaturity, David Copperfield shows the flickering image of an almost nefariously mature David,” for “[w]hat appears to be innocent and pure contains what could be mature and even evil” (217, 221). Both point to...