Grace Moore. Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens. Pp. xii+210 (The Nineteenth Century). Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. £45

Abstract

As an old man looking back on his childhood, Rudyard Kipling described how he and his sister saw a Dickens manuscript in the South Kensington Museum. ‘That man’, Kipling recalled, ‘seemed to me to have written very carelessly; leaving out lots which he had to squeeze in between the lines afterwards’ ( Something of Myself, chapter 1). In Dickens and Empire Grace Moore sets out to show that, with lacunae and changes, ‘Dickens's engagements with the empire in his fiction, his journalism, and in his own life were far more complex and intertwined than has previously been suggested’ (p. 1). Here, ‘the empire’ and its underlying issues are interpreted broadly, to include the Crimean War, Ireland, and race and slavery in America, alongside Britain's growing dominions overseas. The critic therefore provides herself a huge wealth of political, social, scientific, and artistic material to which she can refer. Moore also draws heavily not only on Dickens's own journalism in periodicals such as Household Words and All the Year Round, but also on contemporary articles from the same sources, on the grounds that these helped to shape the context for Dickens's work. Similarly, she makes good use of illustrations from Punch and elsewhere by way of commentary on topical matters (though sadly the quality of reproduction is poor).