Abstract
This article considers two recent digital Dickens reading projects: one following A Tale of Two Cities in 2012 and the other following Our Mutual Friend from May 2014 to November 2015. The article explores the implications of reading Dickens online and how the digital reproduction and re-presentation of Dickens’s work in its multitude of original formats has allowed the attempted re-creation of some aspects of the initial reading experience, encouraging us to re-encounter Dickens’s novels serially, engage with the materialities and rhythms of Victorian serial publication, and reassess our relationship to the Dickensian text.
Highlights
Most contemporary readers encounter Dickens’s fiction as a single-volume book, replete with an introductory essay, bibliography, chronology, footnotes, and, occasionally, small, missed asterisks to demarcate the original weekly or monthly parts
There have been several online reading projects that engage with Dickens’s novels serially: Discovering Dickens: A Community Reading Project, based at Stanford, followed Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860–61) between 2002 and 2005; in 2012, a project jointly run by the University of Leicester and Dickens Journals Online followed A Tale of Two Cities; The Drood Inquiry, an interactive, multimedia exploration of The Mystery of
Following a Dickens novel according to its original format and rhythms of publication brings us closer to the work’s initial modes, cadences, and temporalities, while encouraging us to think about the relationship between Dickens and his readers — and
Summary
Most contemporary readers encounter Dickens’s fiction as a single-volume book, replete with an introductory essay, bibliography, chronology, footnotes, and, occasionally, small, missed asterisks to demarcate the original weekly or monthly parts. Melodrama was the aesthetic mode of the uneducated and the non-elite, reaching a mixed mass audience via illegitimate theatres, cheap fiction, and non-literary journalism, and Dickens advocated a melodramatic stylistics through which he could speak directly and clearly and unite ‘the people’ In her groundbreaking Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), Sally Ledger asserts the centrality of melodrama to Dickens’s radical politics, his special relationship with his readers, and his sense of the purpose of fiction and fantasy.[8] As Juliet John observes, Dickens’s ‘grasp of the power of fantasy was cultural and political as well as personal’ Dickens stands for many as the exemplar of Victorian literature and a pattern of personal kindness and charity, while his work continues to entertain, hearten, inform, enthuse, and inspire
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