Dickens Studies Since 1970

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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 Centennial Volume. It is a handsomely bound and illustrated collection of essays, largely biographical and introductory. Although most of its asseverations are old news to Dickensians (except perhaps for the picture caption identifying Mr. Dick as Mr. Micawber), it may well attract and inform the uninitiated. Other, less responsible products of the current fashion include Frederick Busch's The Mutual Friend and Wolf Mankowitz's Dickens of London. Both deal in tepid sensationalism, the. first via roman a clef innuendo, the second via biography-for-television foreshortening. Though these are unfortunately typical, there are nonetheless several efforts in the popular category one is happy to have. John Creaves's Who's Who in Dickens and Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s The Charles Dickens Encyclopaedia offer us useful, cross-indexed guides to a welter of characters and quotations. 

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