This year’s Dickens Day, held at the Institute of English Studies on Saturday 13th October, was the last in what has been a very full year of Dickens conferences, exhibitions and other celebrations, and it made for a wonderful end to a year of Dickens celebrations. Befitting the bicentenary year, the theme of Dickens Day 2012 was “Dickens and popular culture”, a topic which invited a diverse range of responses to Dickens’s popularity both then and now.
The day opened with a plenary panel that brought together Malcolm Andrews (University of Kent), Jenny Hartley (University of Roehampton), and Paul Schlicke (University of Aberdeen), to explore the resonances of Dickens in popular culture through the lenses of laughter and vulgarity (Andrews), public speaking (Hartley), and the circus (Schlicke) – I particularly enjoyed Schlicke’s discussion of circus performances of various Dickens novels, which saw characters like Pickwick and Sam Weller set on horseback performing in the circus ring.
In the following panel, “revolting bodies” were the theme. Helen Goodman (Royal Holloway, University of London), presented on ‘Dickens, Lunacy and Asylums in Early-Victorian Popular Culture’, looking at Dickens’s conflicted relationship with popular culture in the context of shifts in understandings of mental health in the early Victorian period, particularly around the notion of lunacy as spectacle, and exploring Dickens’s handling of mental illness in characters such as Mr Dick in David Copperfield. Joanne Ella Parsons (University of the West of England) took us from mental to physical health with her paper ‘Dickensian Appetites: The Influence of Dickens’s Monstrous Meals’, exploring how Dickens uses food to convey aspects of character and examining the ways in which this interacts wtih wider Victorian discourses of food. Parsons focused particularly on Miss Havisham’s non-consumed feast in Great Expectations - with some interesting discussion of the different types of wedding cake that evolved throughout the early 19th century – and the vulgarity of food in relation to Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop. She also considered the centrality of food in one of Dickens’s most prominent afterlives, the idea of the Dickensian Christmas.
Sign for The Boot, Cromer Street, London W1; Copyright Mike Quinn and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence
Two further papers on this panel drew mobility and space into their discussion of “revolting bodies”. In Emma Curry’s (Birkbeck College, University of London) paper, the embodied mobility of the revolting body was central to a discussion which focused on ‘Legends and Leg-Ends: History, Feet and Mass Movement in A Tale of Two Cities’. The idea of the revolting, revolutionary body is central to the text’s handling of the French Revolution, but Curry identified that within this the novel repeatedly draws attention to representations of feet and shoes, taking us down to the material motivations and consequences of the mob. Curry explored the dynamics of materiality and embodiment, the mobility of the mob, and notions of history and intellectual thought, suggesting ways in which representations of feet contribute to a reading of the novel’s handling of revolution and historical events. Matthew Ingleby’s (University College London) paper also (sort of!) took feet as its theme, looking at ‘Dickens’s Boot: Popular Violence, the Public House, and the City’s Limits’. Ingleby looked at the urban-rural interactions of Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, locating the pub “The Boot” – a real pub in London which becomes fictionalised as a rural pub in the novel – as central to the delineation of urbanization (or (pub)urbanization as Ingleby neatly coined it), marking as it does the rapid spread of London in the period between the novel’s late-18th century setting and Dickens’s time of writing. Further interesting was discussion of the afterlives of Barnaby Rudge, in which Ingleby noted that a new development in Birmingham, Alabama called “The Preserve” specifically draws on “Dickensian” tropes in its advertising material and has replicated a pub named “The Boot”, and yet in doing so somewhat confuses the urban/rural discourses that surround the pub in the novel.
Cover image of Down in the Hole: The Unwired World of H.B. Ogden, by Joy Delyria and Sean Michael Robinson
In the afternoon, I spoke on a panel which looked at Dickens’s influence and afterlives. Karen Hornick’s (New York University) paper on ‘Popular Critical Discourse and “The Dickensian Aspect”’ looked at critical discourse around The Wire as “Dickensian”. Although it’s become something of a (misused) commonplace to refer to the series as “Dickensian”, often used in ways that overlook the complex dynamics of race, class, economics etc that the series explores, Hornick suggested more critical ways in which the term applies, identifying the totalizing social vision, absence of any solution, and lack of a final “installment” as key to both. Hornick also discussed the awareness of the writers themselves at their handling of this term, particularly in the focus on journalism in the final series (and the conscious play on “The Dickensian Aspect” in one of the later episodes). I was very interested to see that Down in the Hole: The Unwired World of H.B. Ogden, a faux-Victorian serial novel of The Wire, has been released in full form (following the initial mock-up article last year). I followed this with a paper on ‘“Something in the Place”: Dickens 2012 and Literary Tourism’, themes that will be quite familiar to readers of this blog and which I’ll follow up with a few more thoughts in another post. Finally, in an impressive technological move, Tom Ue (University College London) skyped in from the USA with his paper on ‘Dickens, Gissing, and the Life of Writing’, an indicative exploration of the relationship between the two authors.
The day ended with Juliet John’s (Royal Holloway, University of London) keynote presentation on ’Things, Words and the Meanings of Art’. John was a highly fitting keynote for the conference theme given her recent Dickens and Mass Culture (2011) which informed many of the papers throughout the day, and her keynote opened up some indicative new directions in its exploration of things in Dickens’s writing. Her paper is available as a chapter in the very recently published collection Dickens and Modernity and I therefore won’t detail too much here – suffice to say that John suggested more attentiveness to the relationship between words and things not just as semiotic systems but within representational frames, and then took us through a fascinating discussion which ranged across commodity culture in Household Words, money as “thing”, Dickens and celebrity, statues (the celebrity author as thing), and the afterlives of Dickensian things.
Once again the organisers put together an excellent day that prompted some fruitful discussion, and I’m very grateful that I had the chance to be a part of another Dickens Day. Also worth noting is that papers from last year’s Day on Dickens and Travel are to be published in the next issue of English, and should very soon be available via advance access on the website.
