Dickens and the Politics of the Family
Dickens and the Politics of the Family

Author: Catherine Waters

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-07-03

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0521573556

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender. Drawing upon feminist and new historicist methodologies, and focusing upon the normalising function of middle-class domestic ideology, Waters concludes that Dickens's novels record a shift in notions of the family away from an earlier stress upon the importance of lineage and blood towards a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family.

The Other Dickens
The Other Dickens

Author: Lillian Nayder

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2012-04-01

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0801465141

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Catherine Hogarth, who came from a cultured Scots family, married Charles Dickens in 1836, the same year he began serializing his first novel. Together they traveled widely, entertained frequently, and raised ten children. In 1858, the celebrated writer pressured Catherine to leave their home, unjustly alleging that she was mentally disordered-unfit and unloved as wife and mother. Constructing a plotline nearly as powerful as his stories of Scrooge and Little Nell, Dickens created the image of his wife as a depressed and uninteresting figure, using two of her three sisters against her, by measuring her presumed weaknesses against their strengths. This self-serving fiction is still widely accepted. In the first comprehensive biography of Catherine Dickens, Lillian Nayder debunks this tale in retelling it, wresting away from the famous novelist the power to shape his wife's story. Nayder demonstrates that the Dickenses' marriage was long a happy one; more important, she shows that the figure we know only as "Mrs. Charles Dickens" was also a daughter, sister, and friend, a loving mother and grandmother, a capable household manager, and an intelligent person whose company was valued and sought by a wide circle of women and men. Making use of the Dickenses' banking records and legal papers as well as their correspondence with friends and family members, Nayder challenges the long-standing view of Catherine Dickens and offers unparalleled insights into the relations among the four Hogarth sisters, reclaiming those cherished by the famous novelist as Catherine's own and illuminating her special bond with her youngest sister, Helen, her staunchest ally during the marital breakdown. Drawing on little-known, unpublished material and forcing Catherine's husband from center stage, The Other Dickens revolutionizes our perception of the Dickens family dynamic, illuminates the legal and emotional ambiguities of Catherine's position as a "single" wife, and deepens our understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the Victorian age.

Queer Dickens
Queer Dickens

Author: Holly Furneaux

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2009-12-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0191609927

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a radically new reading of Dickens and his major works. It demonstrates that, rather than representing a largely conventional, conservative view of sexuality and gender, he presents a distinctly queer corpus, everywhere fascinated by the diversity of gender roles, the expandability of notions of the family, and the complex multiplicity of sexual desire. The book examines the long overlooked figures of bachelor fathers, maritally resistant men, and male nurses. It explores Dickens's attention to a longing, not to reproduce, but to nurture, his interest in healing touch, and his articulation, over the course of his career, of homoerotic desire. Holly Furneaux places Dickens's writing in a broad literary and social context, alongside authors including Bulwer-Lytton, Tennyson, Braddon, Collins, and Whitman, to make a case for Dickens's central position in queer literary history. Examining novels, poetry, life-writing, journalism, and legal and political debates, Queer Dickens argues that this eminent Victorian can direct us to the ways in which his culture could, and did, comfortably accommodate homoeroticism and families of choice. Further, it contends that Dickens's portrayals of nurturing masculinity and his concern with touch and affect between men challenge what we have been used to thinking about Victorian ideals of maleness. Queer Dickens intervenes in current debates about the Victorians (neither so punitive nor so prudish as we once imagined) and about the methodologies of the histories of the family and of sexuality. It makes the case for a more optimistic, nurturing, and life-affirming trajectory in queer theory.

The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880
The Family Novel in Russia and England, 1800-1880

Author: Anna A. Berman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0192866621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between family structures and narrative structure in the nineteenth-century novel. Comparing Russia and England, it argues that the two nations had fundamentally different conceptions of the family and that these, in turn, shaped the way they constructed plots. The English placed primary value on the vertical, diachronic family axis--looking back to ancestors and head to progeny--while the Russians emphasized the lateral, synchronic axis--family expanding outward in the present from nuclear core, to extended and chosen kin. This difference shaped the way authors plotted consanguineal relations, courtship and marriage, and alternative kinship constructions. Idealizing the domestic sphere and emphasizing family continuity, the English novel made family a conservative force, while Russian novels approached it as a backward site of patriarchal tyranny in desperate need of reform. Russian family plots offered a progressive, liberalizing push toward new, nontraditional family constructions. The book's comparative approach calls for a re-evaluation of reigning theories of the novel, theories that are based on the linear English family model and cannot accommodate the more complex, Russian alternative. It reveals where these theories fall short, explains the reasons for their shortcomings, and offers a new way of conceptualizing family's role in shaping the nineteenth-century novel. Classics from Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev are contextualized in the broader literary landscape of their day, and Russia's great women writers regain their rightful place alongside their male counterparts as the book draws together family history, literary analysis, and novel theory.

Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens

Author: Claire Tomalin

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2011-10-06

Total Pages: 633

ISBN-13: 0141971452

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

THE ACCLAIMED DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY OF ONE OF THE GREATEST BRITISH WRITERS OF ALL TIME Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a journalist, a father of ten, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all, a great novelist. From unpromising beginnings sent to work a black factory age twelve, he rose to such social and literary heights that when he died, the world mourned. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family, he took up with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. From the award-winning author Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading. 'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words
Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

Author: Catherine Waters

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780754655787

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From 1850 to 1859, Charles Dickens 'conducted' Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain predominantly middle-class readers. He filled the journal with articles about various commodities, many of which raise questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services.Although studies of Victorian commodity culture have tended to focus on the novel, scholarly interest in Victorian periodicals and material culture has been prompted by recognition of the major role the press played in disseminating knowledge and information about the proliferating world of goods. At the same time, periodicals like Household Words were themselves commodities that relied on their marketability for survival. This book provides a cultural study of the journal's representation of commodities that records the changing relationship between people and things exposed in the contributors' attempts to come to terms with the development of urban commodity culture at mid-century.

Becoming Dickens
Becoming Dickens

Author: Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0674072235

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This provocative biography tells the story of how an ambitious young Londoner became England’s greatest novelist. Focused on the 1830s, it portrays a restless, uncertain Dickens who could not decide on a career path. Through twists and turns, the author traces a double transformation: in reinventing himself Dickens reinvented the form of the novel.