The Dickensian and Us

Abstract

There can be few teachers of Victorian history, at school or university level, who have not at some stage had recourse to Dickens or the Dickensian. Dickens is a name that we can trust for the memorable image - the bowls of workhouse gruel, the river that runs purple with dye, the prison hulks moored off the marshes, the mud and the fog swirling outside Lincoln's Inn - and the Dickensian has a cultural currency which reassures, drawing people into closer scrutiny of the Victorian age. Not all may be familiar with Podsnappery and Pecksniffery, those two sub-clauses of the Dickensian; but it is difficult to envisage many who do not know the outline of Oliver Twist, or who could not give a definition of what it is to be a 'Scrooge'. It may even be that the Dickensian comes before - helps to illuminate - the Victorian, rather than vice versa. 'For many people', writes Gordon Marsden, 'Charles Dickens is the Victorian era.'1 We shall return to this theme of the perceived relationship between Dickens and his age later. But what does the term Dickensian actually signify, and how did it come to have the meanings that it does today? These are the issues that I shall try to open up in this brief article. It ought to be stated that this is neither a piece of literary criticism (though I have drawn upon the work of literary critics), nor a conscious foray into theory-based history. The modern sense (or senses) of the Dickensian, I argue, has been constructed, but never for the purposes of social or imaginative hegemony; and while common sense alerts us to the varied acts of interpretation which attend every reader (and sometimes viewer), there seems little to be gained from adopting a poststructuralist stance. Dickens was impatient with abstract theories, and wrote about what he felt were 'real' things and emotions. His enduring popularity is partly a matter of artistry, but it also suggests that readers have continued to identify those things about which he wrote as 'real' and compelling. It is from such acts of recognition that our sense of the Dickensian has been formed. What, then, does the term Dickensian connote?2 The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary states rather neutrally that it is frequently used in the sense of 'marked by conditions or features resembling those described by Dickens'. This is not perhaps as flat a definition as it first sounds. For there is built into it, with the word 'resembling', a careful concession to the way in which the term has been widely borrowed from a purely literary context. This is a matter of relating to history through the Dickensian: it has a descriptive power, based upon our knowledge of the novels (and visual