Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit (review)

Abstract

Bowen, John. 2000. Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit. Oxford: Oxford University Press. $70 hcAcademic fans of Dickens s early will be gratified by John Bowen's Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, a ringing defense of the Dickens wrote in the first half of his career. Bowen, Lecturer in English at Keele University, explains that common readers have always loved the early novels, which exhibit humor of a peculiar freshness along with emotional richness, and discusses Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit. Scholars, on the other hand, have favored Dickens's later works, such as Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Our Mutual Friend, viewing those as superior in plot structure and unity of tone and symbolism. These readers have also welcomed the darker vision of the later novels, with their bleak view of Victorian (capitalist) society, because seemingly these dark, could support a higher estimate of Dickens's work.Indeed, Dickens has been a troubling figure for academics. How can a writer who presents characters that appear flat and static and plots that court the sensational-a writer, who is, moreover, enthusiastically welcomed by the common reader-deserve the respect of the academy at all? Bowen addresses this concern, noting that critics this century have placed a higher value on [Dickens's] later novels (2000, 3), but does not discuss these critics. Instead, he opts to tell the story of the major influences on Dickens's reputation, such as George Eliot, who saw Dickens's characters as lacking in realism and repudiated the idea that benevolence and altruism could be nourished in harsh social relations (qtd. in Bowen 2000, 190). For Bowen, not only is Dickens a great writer according to any standards the academy can propose, but, further, the early deserve our most serious consideration.Bowen, who demonstrates a mastery of the body of Dickens criticism, claims eclecticism as his theoretical approach: I do not believe that a secure and grounded theory or method on which to base the reading of major literary texts is (2000, 2). He cites numerous literary critics and cultural writers briefly and always pertinently and finds Jacques Derrida the most useful, citing him on genre, language, and writing. But the figure he quotes most often in his compact 200-page work is G.K. Chesterson, whose insights he turns to continually.Bowen points out that current critical theory is hospitable to Dickens's writing, and to his early work in particular. A theoretical approach that focuses on gaps and disjunctures and appreciates the richly multifarious text can help to illuminate Dickens. Similarly, an approach that employs rhetorical analysis and looks for connections between the popular and the serious-instead of dismissing or denigrating the popular-is particularly suited to Dickens. Thus it is possible finally to move beyond George Elliot, George Lewes, and other detractors and to value Dickens without reservations (and it is clear that for Bowen there are no reservations). Indicative of Dickens's current standing is philosophers' interest in him: Bowen cites Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Bowen himself makes large philosophical claims for Dickens, crediting him with deconstructing central beliefs of Victorian culture, our culture, and Western metaphysics more generally in Martin Chuzzlewit (2000, 186).Bowen's main contribution is to show us a radical Dickens, a writer committed to social change. For Bowen the early contain a liberating insight: they present and enact [an] overwhelming sense that the world is profoundly, radically open to change (2000, 10). Dickens thought of himself as a radical, Bowen reminds us, and was considered one by his contemporaries. …