Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre (review)

Abstract

Objecting to Foucault's "unexamined belief in the interiority of modern culture" (2), Deborah Vlock attempts to demonstrate that Victorian writers saw the world, and the Victorian public read novels, "through the lens of popular [theatrical] performance. In other words, the 'drama' was not supplanted by the novel in the nineteenth century [as Foucault and David Miller assume] but merged with it" (3). Victorians frequently encountered fiction through public or family readings, she notes, and even when they read privately, they experienced the book as an "imaginary text," created by "idioms and gestures and a whole range of signifiers established by popular entertainment" (6). Because the "reading skills" of Victorians "were cultivated in the theatre" (91), we ought to envision them "not as isolated, curled up on a window seat in the privacy of the sitting room, as D. A. Miller has suggested, but sitting in a theatre, the imagination's playhouse, with a book in one hand and an eye and ear on the stage" (192).