Abbott Ikeler on Blogger

           The modern reader frequently charges nineteenth-century fiction—and Dickens' longer novels in particular—with a penalty for excess baggage. Orwell, writing in 1939, complains:  In the end the original story has been buried under the details.  And in all of Dickens's most characteristic passages it is the same. His imagination overwhelms everything, like a kind of weed.1 Orwell has chiefly in mind the exuberance with which Dickens floods the immediate fictional moment, but later critics—including Leavis, Garis, and Frye—broaden the attack. They find the tangled subplots of the longer books especially off-putting: to them, squads of satellite figures divert the novel's thrust; they clutter or simply complicate argument and form, giving us a busier book but not a better or a subtler one.            In recent years one rarely hears such carping. The current generation of critics, caring less for concision...

The observation of the Dickens centenary in 1970 was hardly  the perfuctontory ritual one might have expected. Nearly one the hundred fifty studies, short and long, appeared in that year alone. And what the calendar triggered, the critical community sustained: since 1970 upwards of eighty titles have been added annually to the Dickens bibliography. Certainly this decade's bull market has thrust into print many a dissertation that might otherwise have mouldered in its university's archives, but in general the quality of published scholarship has been high.  First of all, one must reckon with the commercial response. Even in an off year, public curiosity about Dickens generates a good deal of literary effluvia denied the likes of Eliot, Thackeray, and Meredith. Nineteen seventy produced a bumper crop of Pickwick hats and Weller corduroys, and some notice of the hoopla seems in order here. The best of the coffee-table books is E. W. F. Tomlin's Charles Dickens 1812-1870: A C...