““Dickens's As If””: Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality

Abstract

f recurrent colloquialisms and everyday phrases inscribe the perspectives a culture most habitually assumes, then conditional analogy and the subjunctive mood were perhaps the most characteristic Victorian perspectives. “As if” underwrote the way the Victorians knew. Charles Dickens’s prose contains an extraordinary number of “as ifs”: 411 in Dombey and Son (1846–48), 393 in David Copperfield (1849–50), 392 in Our Mutual Friend (1865), 266 in the substantially shorter Great Expectations (1860–61), and so on. This is a common phrase and these are long books, but “as if” only appears five times each in Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne (1858) and Framley Parsonage (1860), and only about a third as much (135 instances) in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–48). This does not mean that an epistemology of “as if” did not also underwrite the styles of Trollope and Thackeray, because “as if” is just one pronounced articulation of conditional analogy and the subjunctive mood. Dickens used “as if” at a significantly higher statistical frequency than almost all other familiar writers, but other Victorian writers did use different forms of conditional similes more than pre- and post-Victorians. i isolate “as if” in this paper as a paradigm for a historically specific Victorian investment in the subjunctive mood because i can easily trace and count iterations of the phrase.