Wiley-Blackwell is delighted to release the following special issue as part of the ‘Dickens’s World’ Online Conference – read the articles below for FREE!
PUTTING THE WORLD INTO A BOX: A GEOGRAPHY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY ‘TRAVELLING LANDSCAPES’
Veronica Della Dora
Originally published in Geografiska Annaler
New Histories of British Imperial Communication and the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th and Early 20th Centuries
Glen O’Hara
Originally published in History Compass
PEOPLING THE VICTORIAN GOLDFIELDS: FROM BOOM TO BUST, 1851–1901
Charles Fahey
Originally published in Australian Economic History Review
Victorian Sexualities
Holly Furneaux
Originally published in Literature Compass
Unsettling the Normative: Articulations of Masculinity in Victorian Literature and Culture
Dustin Friedman
Originally published in Literature Compass
Club Talk: Gossip, Masculinity and Oral Communities in Late Nineteenth-Century London
Amy Milne-Smith
Originally published in Gender & History
Dickens and Women
Kathryn Sutherland
Originally published in Critical Quarterly
A‘Pilgrim Reformer’at the Heart of the Empire: Behramji Malabari in Late-Victorian London
ANTOINETTE BURTON
Originally published in Gender & History
#1 by Kylie Mirmohamadi on March 7, 2012 - 10:41 pm
Kathryn Sutherland’s thought-provoking commentary has set me thinking about more recent accounts of Dickens’s life and work, especially as they relate to women. The project of Lillian Nayder’s ‘The Other Dickens’ clearly was to rehabilitate Catherine Hogarth’s many times made-over image, but surely its greater feminist statement lies in its insistence that Catherine Hogarth’s life can be read in its own terms, and through its network of female relationships, rather than solely in terms of Dickens’s life and work. I recently saw Miriam Margolyes’s Dickens’s Women, and greatly admired her extraordinary performance, and would be interested to know if this account had been adjusted in the light of recent biographical work and scholarship.
#2 by Kylie Mirmohamadi on March 7, 2012 - 11:30 pm
While this is not an exactly parallel phenomenon, Antoinette’s Burton’s wonderful article might get us thinking about post-colonial re-imaginings of Dickens, especially Peter Carey’s situation of the struggles of Jack Maggs in the heart of metropolitan London (see John O. Jordan’s entry on Postcolonial Dickens in the Companion to Dickens in the conference Reading Room).
#3 by Tamy Wagner on March 8, 2012 - 3:48 am
“Global Dickens,” “Postcolonial Dickens,” “The American Dickens,” &c. – reassessing Dickens’s impact on, representation of, and continued presence throughout the world is perhaps unsurprisingly an important connecting theme throughout his 200th birthday. It is wonderful to see so many different approaches both to how Dickens himself wrote about what could be called a global nineteenth century and how he is central to popular culture around the world now: from 1950s film adaptations in Cantonese to more recent literary reworkings of his narratives. Charles Fahey’s article on the Victorian goldfield brings both a different geographical area into this wide spectrum and makes the range of articles more interdisciplinary. In this alone it is a welcome addition. But I hope it also draws attention to the importance that we reassess Dickens’s representation of Australia, his connections to the country (including the reading tour that never happened), and to the ways in which both he and Trollope influenced in Australian novels of the time. This conference, I hope, will also help to foster more discussion on these issues.
#4 by Joanne Ella Parsons on March 8, 2012 - 11:14 am
I am absolutely delighted to see that papers have been included here on the more complex issues surrounding Victorian sexuality (Furneaux “Victorian Sexualities”), alongside those that consider the expected and perceived gender divisions that are placed upon the Victorians both by the Victorians themselves and our modern readings of them (Friedman “Unsettling the Normative”). I would argue that in opening up these fields of academic enquiry, it will lead to more productive, richer and truer readings of both the period and the texts that it created, which obviously includes Dickens. By allowing ourselves to understand the more complex and nuanced relationships that the Victorians had with sexuality and gender, it will certainly enable us to read his characters in a new and clearer light and this, surely, can only be a good thing.
#5 by Rosedda Reeves on March 8, 2012 - 2:45 pm
In response to Dicken’s and Women, I found it very intoresting. I will be paying closer attention to the roles of women when reading Dicken’s novels in the future.
#6 by Charlotte Mathieson (@cemathieson) on March 8, 2012 - 9:36 pm
I agree, Joanne, there are some useful pieces here in assessing the complexities of the period. I particularly enjoyed Glen O’Hara’s piece on the telegraph network, which usefully suggests a note of caution in reading c19th technological development and the global connectedness it brought. As Professor Bowen’s keynote also hinted at, such developments occur within a complex field of meanings and reading the Victorian “response” is never simple, often fraught with ambivalence and anxiety. I found O’Hara’s article a useful complement to work on transport networks of the period, which similarly displayed uneven patterns of development and intensified national tensions.
#7 by Makenzie on March 9, 2012 - 3:57 am
Dickens and Women
It was fascinating. I was unaware of Dickens past issues with women and whatever psychological associations remained. However, now knowing, it is clear in his treatment of characters. Nancy, for example, is a relatively strong female, but is killed brutally. Lady Dedlock of Bleak House is constantly haunted by her sexual mistakes, and is even implied to be barren as a result.