statements (and there are several others) are wrenched out of context here; nevertheless, the text surrounding them doesn’t seem to illuminate or clarify to a degree that would allow such statements to settle unquestioned into the larger texture of the work. Notwithstanding the foregoing observations, however, this book attempts, and generally succeeds at, a truly daunting task in tracing through hymnody the history of the Christian Myth from its beginnings, through the Middle Ages and Reformation, and up through modern times; and it does cover major hymnal “topics” in the process, all the while pointing out either explicitly or by implication the inestimable importance of the phenomenon of hymnody in Christian experience, worship, and society. As indicated at the outset, it should find use in several disciplines, and does seem to lay effectively the groundwork for further study. Undeniably, it succeeds in stimulating the reader’s wish to pursue the subject in the highly promising sequel. richard Arnold / The University of Lethbridge Juliet McMaster, Dickens the Designer (London: Macmillan Studies in Vic torian Literature, 1987). 248. $53.00 Dickens the Designer is both a refreshingly original study of the visual ele ments in Dickens’s characterization and narrative artistry, and an important contribution to the history of representation explored so magisterially by Martin Meisel in Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983). One of Meisel’s chief con cerns was to show that nineteenth-century narrative in general, whether in the form of novels, pictures or plays, engages an “expanding universe of dis course, rule-governed but open, using a recognizable vocabulary of gesture, expression, configuradon, object, and ambiance” (Meisel, 11). This discourse finds its site in the “complex interplay between narrative and picture” in nineteenth-century art forms, and one of its most important manifestations is “the iconography of character and emotion” (3). “In the iconography of character, external marks — such as a man’s fur collar and cigar or a woman’s full bosom — came to signal not merely moral qualities, but predictable func tions in plot and situation. In the iconography of emotion, interior experience was conveyed through a conventionalized language of facial expression, pose, and gesture” (5). Only recently in the Western tradition, Meisel adds, have we accepted the convention that true feeling is inexpressible; the “earlier convention took for granted a full expressibility.. . and demanded a direct extemalization” (7). 354 That such extemalization is a hallmark of Dickens’s characterization has often been noted, by Barbara Hardy among others. As McMaster puts it in Dickens the Designer, “it is Dickens’s unrivalled power to make character visible” (xiii). But the question of how Dickens goes about making us see his characters has been less often addressed. This is the subject of Part I of Dickens the Designer, entitled “Outward and Visible Signs.” Although Mc Master does not refer to Meisel’s study, her similar interest in narrative and pictorial conventions of characterization is apparent in her focus on the “iconography of physique, gesture and appurtenance” that Dickens uses to reveal “character and emotion” (10). “Dickens wrote as something of an expert on bodies and their signification,” McMaster points out, and, with a dash of Dickensian whimsy, she provides “some notes towards a dictionary” of this language under the headings of Heads, Faces, Bodies, Hair, Eyes, Noses, Mouths and teeth, Clothes, Expres sion and gesture, Colour, Space, and Light and shade. This delightfully engag ing section of her study ranges freely throughout the novelist’s canon to assemble much information concerning Dickens’s understanding and use of phrenology, physiognomy, and treatises on expression and gesture. Among other things, McMaster documents Dickens’s knowledge of Gall’s system of phrenology, endorsed by his friend D. Elliotson, Lavater’s Essays on Physiog nomy, and Sir Charles Bell’s Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. She demonstrates Dickens’s fascination with gesture as “a secret language of com munication” — most notably, the gesture of laying the finger to one side of the nose, but also the more esoteric gestures of coachmen (52) — and his paint erly sensitivity to not only the “symbolic values” of colours, but also their “quality and their modulation by contrast...
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Jan 1, 2006
Mary Tod Gray 
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