Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 From Sympathy to Altruism: The Roots of Philanthropic Discourse
- 2 Dickensian Realism and Telescopic Philanthropy
- 3 Hawthorne's ‘Cold Fancy’ and the Revision of Sympathetic Exchange
- 4 Altruism's Conquest of Modern Generalisation in George Eliot
- 5 William Dean Howells's ‘Altrurian’ Aesthetic in the Modern Marketplace
- Coda
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In deciding how misery is best alleviated, we have to consider, not only what is done for the afflicted, but what is the reactive effect upon those who do it. The relationship that springs up between benefactor and beneficiary is, for this present state of the world, a refining one.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (1851)Everything set forth within these pages … is substantially true and within the truth …. In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar things.
Charles Dickens, Preface to Bleak House (1852–3)No Victorian writer had as many uses for philanthropy as did Charles Dickens, and from the early 1840s onward the trope became increasingly necessary to his depiction of social relations and, more particularly, the challenges stemming from the forms of social differentiation produced by modern industrialism. Just as Hawthorne does, Dickens identifies institutional philanthropy with a modern instrumentalising logic. But, unlike Hawthorne, for whom the phenomenon came to stand for a fundamentally antisocial regime in which the sympathetic impulse is stymied, Dickens's treatment is less unified and finds new rhetorical and aesthetic potentialities in philanthropic discourse. Dickens first uses the figure of philanthropy in A Christmas Carol (1843); from its initial incarnation, that figure is tied to the author's aesthetic concerns, including the role of sentiment in the representation of social difference and the relationship between material culture and modern middle-class subjectivity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Philanthropy in British and American FictionDickens Hawthorne Eliot and Howells, pp. 75 - 103Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2007