The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1988)

The Victorian Newsletter is sponsored for the Victorian Group of Modern Language Association by the Western Kentucky University and is published twice annually.Inventing Victorians: Virginia Woolf's "Memoirs of a Novelist" / Mary Kaiser Loges -- Distortion Versus Revaluation: Three Twentieth-Century Responses to Victorian Fiction / Jerome Meckier -- The Dover Bitch: Victorian Duck or Modernist Duck/Rabbit / Gerhard Joseph -- Carlyle's Denial of Axiological Content in Science / Charles W. Schaefer -- Mixed Metaphor, Mixed Gender: Swinburne and the Victorian Critics / Thaïs E. Morgan -- The Humanities Tradition of Matthew Arnold / William E. Buckler -- Oliver (Un)Twisted: Narrative Strategies in Oliver Twist / Joseph Sawicki -- Representation and Homophobia in The Picture of Dorian Gray / Richard Dellamora -- Coming In The Victorian Newsletter -- Books Receive

Dickens\u27s \u3ci\u3eGreat Expectations:\u3c/i\u3e Misnar\u27s Pavilion versus Cinderella

Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier’s acclaimed Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction examined fierce literary competition between leading novelists who tried to establish their credentials as realists by rewriting Dickens\u27s novels. Here, Meckier argues that in Great Expectations, Dickens not only updated David Copperfield but also rewrote novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Brontë. He periodically revised his competitors’ themes, characters, and incidents to discredit their novels as unrealistic fairy tales imbued with Cinderella motifs. Dickens darkened his fairy tale perspective by replacing Cinderella with the story of Misnar’s collapsible pavilion from The Tales of the Genii (a popular, pseudo-oriental collection). The Misnar analogue supplied a corrective for the era’s Cinderella complex, a warning to both Haves and Have-nots, and a basis for Dickens’s tragicomic view of the world. Jerome Meckier, professor of English at the University of Kentucky and past president of The Dickens Society, is the author of several books, including Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction and Innocent Abroad. Dickens\u27s Great Expectations completes an informal trilogy. Destined to become one of the most important analyses of Great Expectations, this carefully researched book is recommended. —Choice Meckier insightfully argues that, in Great Expectations, Dickens was consciously rewriting novels by Lever, Thackeray, Collins, Shelley, and Charlotte and Emily Bronte, as well as Dickens’s own David Copperfield. . . . Contains an impressive amount of excellent material. —Deborah Thomas Establishes Dickens as a profound social thinker in Great Expectations, one whose thought is never abstract but mediated through language, character, and narrative, through aesthetic demands of form in the widest sense. —Dickens Quarterly Incisive, intelligent, spirited, and cogently argued. . . . A wholly valid close reading of Dickens’s great novel. —Elliot Engel Meckier compiles compelling evidence to support his categorization of Great Expectations as a parody of and response to what he deemed unrealistic portrayals of Victorian culture using, or misusing, the trope of Cinderella. —English Literature in Transition Focuses on what is arguably Dickens’s finest novel. —Victorian Newsletter Meckier’s astonishing finesse as a close reader is happily instructive. —Victorian Studies A thorough reevaluation of the ways in which Charles Dickens employed fairy tale plots late in his career. —Virginia Quarterly Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1082/thumbnail.jp

Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens\u27s American Engagements

In 1842, Victorian England’s foremost novelist visited America, naively expecting both a return to Eden and an ideal republic that would demonstrate progress as a natural law. Instead, Charles Dickens suffered a traumatic disappointment that darkened his vision of society and human nature for the remainder of his career. His second tour, in 1867-68, ostensibly more successful, proved no antidote for the first. Using new materials—letters, diaries, and publishers’ records—Jerome Meckier enumerates the reasons for the failure of Dickens’s American tours. During the first, an informal conspiracy of newspaper editors frustrated his call for copyright protection. More important, he grew less equalitarian and more British daily, a disillusioned novelist discovering his true self. His American Notes (1842) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) repudiated travel books by Tocqueville, Mrs. Trollope, and Martineau that had either viewed America as civilization’s new dawn or voiced insufficient reservations. Having plumbed man’s tainted hear abroad, the creator of Mr. Pickwick saw everything more satirically at home: he became a radical pessimist, a dedicated reformer who nevertheless ruled out a utopian future. Dickens’s return visit, the reading tour intended to make his fortune, was an ironic second coming. Thanks to poor planning and management, ticket scalpers benefited as greatly as the much-lionized performer. Meckier argues that Dickens’s business dealings with his American publishers were neither as smooth nor as lucrative as legend holds, but that the novelist’s health problems and his eagerness to bring along his mistress have been much exaggerated. In fascinating counterpoint, Meckier charts the ticket speculators’ systematic successes, the ups and downs of Dickens’s catarrh, and the steady inroads he made into the heart of Annie Fields, his American publisher’s young wife. This critical/biographical study reshapes our view of the life and career of the giant of Victorian Literatures. Jerome Meckier, professor of English at the University of Kentucky, is author of Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1046/thumbnail.jp

Hidden Rivalries in Victorian Fiction: Dickens, Realism, and Revaluation

Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists themselves read and respond to each other’s creations when they first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other’s novels as a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity, the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by undercutting someone else’s—usually Charles Dickens’s. Trollope, Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside. Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens—determined to remain inimitable—replied to all of his rivals by redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelists read and rewrote each other\u27s work, this innovative study alters present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Jerome Meckier is professor of English at the University of Kentucky. He has published extensively on the Victorians and on modern British and American literature. A fascinating, informative book. . . . Much of the territory which it covers is either hitherto unexplored or revealed to posses features previously unnoted. —Dickens Quarterly Lively and assertive. —Key Reporterhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1089/thumbnail.jp