Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.

Given their pedagogical nature, many Victorian novels are highly politicized; their narratives are filtered through the value schemes, social views, and conscious purposes of their authors. Victorian women were largely expected to dedicate themselves to the social and moral betterment of their families. Women were expected to be soft, meek, quiet, modest, submissive, gentle, patient, and spiritual; men were supposed to be aggressive, assertive, resilient, disciplined, and competitive. These expectations were repeatedly endorsed through the conduct books of the period, which encouraged people to adhere to proper behavior. The Victorian era also viewed fiction as a didactic tool and as a means to propagate morality. Thus novels of the period typically present women as subordinate to men and as angels of the home. Women who conform to the social norms are usually rewarded in these fictitious worlds, whereas women who violate society's standards are often penalized. Certainly the novels of Charles Dickens fall into the larger didactic trend of Victorian fiction, and like other works of the period, his novels overtly support the conventional values of Victorian society. Dickens typically uses descriptive detail to register approval or disapproval of certain women, and these women are rewarded or chastized through his plots. But on a less obvious level, Dickens also challenges the prevailing Victorian attitude toward women. A close look at his works shows that patriarchs do not automatically deserve the respect they command from their privileged social positions. Women—however virtuous—are unable to produce moral or social change, and many women succeed outside the constraints of domesticity. This book provides a penetrating analysis of how Dickens' novels ultimately fail to promote the conventional Victorian behavioral ideal for women and discusses how his works subvert the domestic ideology of the nineteenth century.

This work offers an original interpretation of the mothers of the protagonists in Dickens's autobiographical novels. Taking Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection and Mary Douglas's anthropological analysis of pollution as its conceptual framework, the book argues that Dickens's primary emotional response towards the mother who abandoned him to work in a blacking warehouse was disgust, and suggests that we can trace similar signs of disgust in the narrators of his fictional autobiographies, David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. The author provides a close reading of Dickens's autobiographical fragment and opens up the possibility that Dickens's feelings towards his mother actually bore a significant influence on his fiction. The book closes with a provocative discussion of Dickens's compulsive Sikes and Nancy public readings.

Undoubtedly the best-selling author of his day and well loved by readers in succeeding generations, Charles Dickens was not always a favorite among critics. Celebrated for his novels advocating social reform, for half a century after his death he was ridiculed by those academics who condescended to write about him. Only the faithful band of devotees who called themselves Dickensians kept alive an interest in his work. Then, during the Second World War, he was resurrected by critics, and was soon being hailed as the foremost writer of his age, a literary genius alongside Shakespeare and Milton. More recently, Dickens has again been taken to task by a new breed of literary theorists who fault his chauvinism and imperialist attitudes. Whether he has been adored or despised, however, one thing is certain: no other Victorian novelist has generated more critical commentary. This book traces Dickens's reputation from the earliest reviews through the work of early 21st-century commentators, showing how judgments of Dickens changed with new standards for evaluating fiction. Mazzeno balances attention to prominent critics from the late 19th century through the first three quarters of the 20th with an emphasis on the past three decades, during which literary theory has opened up new ways of reading Dickens. What becomes clear is that, in attempting to provide fresh insight into Dickens's writings, critics often reveal as much about the predilections of their own age as they do about the novelist. Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania.

The 20th and 21st centuries have continued the quest, so aptly described by G. K. Chesterton in 1906, to ‘find’ Charles Dickens and recapture the characteristically Dickensian. From research attempting to classify and categorise the nature of his popularity to a century of film adaptations, Dickens’s legacy encompasses an array of conventional and innovative forms. Dickens After Dickens includes chapters from rising and leading scholars in the field, offering creative and varied discussion of the continued and evolving influence of Dickens and the nature of his legacy across the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Its chapters show the surprising resonances that Dickens has had and continues to have, arguing that the author’s impact can be seen in mainstream cultural phenomena such as HBO’s TV series The Wire and Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch, as well as in diverse areas such as Norwegian literature, video games and neo-Victorian fiction. It discusses Dickens as a biographical figure, an intertextual moment, and a medium through which to explore contemporary concerns around gender and representation. The new research represented in this book brings together a range of methodologies, approaches and sources, offering an accessible and engaging re-evaluation that will be of interest to scholars of Dickens, Victorian fiction, adaptation, and cultural history, and to teachers, students, and general readers interested in the ways in which we continue to read and be influenced by the author’s work. This collection is edited by Dr Emily Bell (Loughborough University) with a Foreword by Professor Juliet John (Royal Holloway, University of London), author of Dickens and Mass Culture (OUP). Dr Bell is a board member for the Oxford Dickens series and an editor for the Dickens Letters Project. She also acted as the first Communications Committee Chair of the international Dickens Society, and has published on Dickens, life writing and commemoration.

As the nineteenth-century drew to a close, women became more numerous and prominent in British journalism. This book offers a fascinating introduction to the work lives of twelve such journalists, and each essay examines the career, writing and strategic choices of women battling against the odds to secure recognition in a male-dominated society.

Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies is a comprehensive and authoritative guide to the study of one of the most important Victorian novelists. Its editors, Robert L. Patten and John Bowen, are leading authorities on Dickens and the international team of contributors they have assembled contains some of the most exciting critics of nineteenth-century fiction writing today. The book covers the whole range of Dickens's writing and criticism about it, including biographical, theoretical and historical approaches. It is based on up-to-the-minute research and written in a lively and engaging way, and will be essential reading for all students and scholars of this canonical writer.