Charles Dickens: The Public Readings

1977 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 923
Author(s):  
Sylvere Monod ◽  
Philip Collins
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Public

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

Small Boroughs and Political Modernization 1832–1868: A Cornwall Case Study

1997 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 622-642
Author(s):  
Edwin Jaggard
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Anthony Trollope ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Political Modernization ◽  
Political Differences

Mid-nineteenth century elections in England's small towns were vividly described in contemporary fiction. For example, Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers included the Eatanswill contest in which a bucolic exuberance among voters rendered irrelevant the political differences between candidates Slumkey and Fizkin. Who could blame the enfranchised mob for their behavior during polling when “Excisable articles were remarkably cheap at all the public houses,” producing an epidemic of dizziness “under which they [the voters] might frequently be seen lying on the pavements in a state of utter insensibility.” Following his bitter experience in unsuccessfully contesting Beverley in East Yorkshire, one of the Eatanswills of the sixties, Anthony Trollope parodied the election in Ralph the Heir when he took his readers to Percycross, where the Conservative Sir Thomas Underwood managed to edge out Ontario Moggs, the radical bootmaker. Similarly, at Trollope's Silverbridge (in The Prime Minister), the levers of the “Castle” interest had long been pulled by the ironmonger Sprugeon and the cork sole maker Sprout, issues and principles apparently being of peripheral importance.

Social and Moral Vision in Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn

1970 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Nicolaus C. Mills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Mark Twain ◽  
Sir Walter Scott ◽  
Moral Vision ◽  
Great Expectations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Episodic Nature ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Specific Influence

With the exception of Sir Walter Scott and Fenimore Cooper, no two British and American writers of the nineteenth century are compared as frequently as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Yet, despite the far greater literary importance of Dickens and Twain, we are without a thorough understanding of the parallels in their work. Why does this problem exist? There are two basic reasons. The first lies in the thinness of Twain's comments on Dickens. If, to a modern critic like Ellen Moers, it is clear that Twain resembled Dickens in ‘the theatricality of his prose, the conception of the public as an audience of responsive listeners rather than as solitary readers, the episodic nature of his fiction cut to an oral rather than a literary measure’, to Twain himself it seemed unnecessary to make such an acknowledgement. In his fiction, as well as in his correspondence, Dickens's specific influence is at best marginal, and in his Autobiography he relegates Dickens to the position of the artist-innovator of the public reading.

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

CHARLES DICKENS DESCRIBES HIS IMPRESSION OF THE CHILDREN AT THE PERKINS INSTITUTION FOR THE BLIND

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-365
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Favorable Impression ◽  
Personal Appearance ◽  
The Town ◽  
At Home

In his American Notes, published in 1843, Dickens vividly described his six months' visit to the United States between January and June 1842. None of the public institutions that he visited made a more favorable impression on him than the Perkins Institution for the Blind, located in Boston. He wrote: I went to see this place [the Perkins Institution] one very fine winter morning: an Italian sky above, and the air so clear and bright on every side, that even my eyes, which are none of the best, could follow the minute lines and scraps of tracery in distant buildings. Like most other public institutions in America, of the same class, it stands a mile or two without the town, in a cheerful, healthy spot; and is an airy, spacious, handsome edifice. The children were at their daily tasks in different rooms, except a few who were already dismissed, and were at play. Here, as in many institutions, no uniform is worn; and I was very glad of it, for two reasons. Firstly, because I am sure that nothing but senseless custom and want of thought would reconcile us to the liveries and badges we are so fond of at home. Secondly, because the absence of these things presents each child to the visitor in his or her own proper character, with its individuality unimpaired—not lost in a dull, ugly, monotonous repetition of the same unmeaning garb, which is really an important consideration. The wisdom of encouraging a little harmless pride in personal appearance even among the blind, or the whimsical absurdity of considering charity and leather breeches inseparable companions, as we do, requires no comment.

Dickens and the Theatre

2018 ◽  
pp. 665-681
Author(s):  
John Glavin
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
The Self ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
The Public ◽  
Driving Pattern ◽  
Amateur Theatre ◽  
Mode A

Throughout his life and writing Charles Dickens expressed profound ambivalence about the professional theatre, which in almost equal parts he adored and loathed. As writer, performer, and public man, he expended both energy and invention to describe and to experience a theatricality purged of theatre. In his prose, he explored theatricality in increasingly bold ways until in the final decades it had become a driving pattern in the novels. In his life, until the late 1850s, he used amateur performance to satisfy this quest. But as the 1850s turned into the 1860s, he was able finally to invent, in the Public Readings, his ideal performance mode: a theatricality liberated entirely from theatre, which permitted him to feel the cynosure of attention without exposing, or risking, the self. The first part of this chapter traces Dickens’s complex relationship with both the professional and amateur theatre. The second part tackles the more elusive, and more problematic, question of what it may mean to call Dickens’s work theatrical, arguing that for him theatricality involves not direct mimesis but a gesture toward resemblance.

BOY-ORPHANS, MESMERIC VILLAINS, AND FILM STARS: INSCRIBINGOLIVER TWISTINTOTREASURE ISLAND

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
U. C. Knoepflmacher
Keyword(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Robert Louis Stevenson ◽  
The Public ◽  
Film Stars ◽  
Treasure Island ◽  
Early Novel

Oliver Twist,the early novelwhich a twenty-five-year-old Charles Dickens published serially from 1837 to 1839, revised in the 1840s, and featured in the public readings he offered from 1867 until his death in 1870, might well have inspired the thirty-two-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson before he serialized his own first novel,Treasure Island, in 1882. There are, after all, remarkable similarities between the two texts. For each dramatizes a young boy's immersion in a counter-world headed by villains who defy the norms of a dubious patriarchal order. What is more, the strong spell that thieves like Fagin and Bill Sikes and pirates like Billy Bones and Long John Silver exert over the innocents they mesmerize infects readers of each narrative as well as viewers of their many cinematic adaptations. We thus face a quandary. Despite our empathy with little Oliver and with his adolescent counterpart Jim Hawkins, we may question each boy's reintegration into an order whose fissures have been radically exposed.

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