Reviewed by: Dickens and Race by Laura Peters Grace Moore (bio) Dickens and Race, by Laura Peters; pp. xii + 169. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013, £65.00, $100.00. In lots of ways, Laura Peters’ Dickens and Race is a useful book. Drawing on her expertise in children’s literature (Peters is also the author of the excellent Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire [2000]) Peters uses childhood as a lens through which to examine Charles Dickens’s complex and shifting attitudes toward other races. Peters argues convincingly—following Michael Slater—that childhood stories like the Tales of the Arabian Nights generated powerful and polarized responses to the “exotic” and the “savage” that the novelist never left behind (2). According to Peters, 1848 is a key year in the development of Dickens’s thinking on racial matters. She presents a helpful overview of the author’s scientific reading and thinking at this time, drawing on Dickens’s journalism to show the depth of his engagement with works like Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) and his friend Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837). Peters expertly guides the reader through the complexities of nineteenth-century debates on race, drawing upon (but not always acknowledging) previous work in the area that draws out connections between class and race. She quite rightly highlights Dickens’s deep concerns about degeneration, particularly within the urban poor, and draws some important parallels between articles by Dickens pertaining to domestic social problems (such as “Ignorance and Crime” [1848] and “Ignorance and Its Victims” [1848]) and others on racial and scientific questions. One of the most striking elements of Peters’s argument surrounding the significance of the year 1848 is a subtle and compelling discussion of the home. Underpinned by Catherine Waters’s influential work on Dickens and the dysfunctional family, Peters equates the troubled home of Dombey and Son (1846–48) with a broader form of national domesticity that is equally disturbed. Indeed, when she asserts that “Issues of empire and [End Page 350] race permeate both home and culture at this time” and “The novel is peopled with migrants, nomads and those with multiple homes who never seem to be at home anywhere,” Peters might just as easily be writing of contemporary London (23). For Peters, “Dickens’s approach to race intermeshes both science and fancy,” and she suggests that this approach was crystalized through the novelist’s review of Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science (1848) (28). Turning from Hunt back to Dombey and Son, Peters reads the novel’s enigmatic “native” (who is, of course, the only non-native in the text) as a type of repository for colonial violence, arguing that the beatings visited upon him by Major Bagstock mark a distinction between class and race (31). This is an intriguing idea, and while Peters is correct in her suggestion that the native’s mistreatment allows us to see colonial excess at its worst, Rosemary Bodenheimer’s Knowing Dickens (2007) shows us that child factory workers remained just as vulnerable to mistreatment in the workplace at this time. In addition to its important discussion of exoticism, Dickens and Race also offers an interesting subsection on Dickens’s imaginative engagement with China—an area that deserves greater attention, notwithstanding Jeremy Tambling’s important contributions. Although, as Peters comments, Dickens often saw China as a place of insular stagnation, it was also a place of hope. Hence, Walter Gay and Florence Dombey head there as their “happy-ever-after destination” after their marriage, while in later novels like Little Dorrit (1855–57) and Great Expectations (1860–61), China offers the chance to escape—albeit temporarily—from Britain (44). Dickens and Race is not always an easy read. Peters’s decision to write in the continuous present tense is a curious one, and the strategy is not always effective. Furthermore, her prose is at times a little repetitive, which makes this short book more challenging to read than it might otherwise have been. Some of Dickens’s characters are consistently misidentified, with Peters referring to “Miss Prosser,” rather than “Miss Pross” in A Tale of...
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Jul 1, 2017
Hunyoung Shin + 1
Open Access
