Dickens and The Waste Land

Abstract

In The Waste Land's centenary year, this article considers Dickens's pervasive impact on T. S. Eliot's poem. Echoes and allusions in The Waste Land, as well as direct references in Eliot's letters, range across Dickens's work from Pickwick Papers to Our Mutual Friend. Attention is paid, for example, to precedents for Eliot's "waste land" in Dickens's urban landscapes; a shared interest, in Dombey and "A Game at Chess," in Shakespeare's Cleopatra; images of imprisonment; and the "Problem of Dickensian Allusion" that arises from the sheer extent of the connections that might be made.