Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Stephen Wall and Trollope
- Part 1 On Trollope
- Part 2 On Dickens and Others
- 3 [George Eliot and Her Readers] [1965]
- 4 Jane Austen's Judgments [1968]
- 5 Dickens: New Words and Old Opinions [1969]
- 6 [Dickens and His Readers] [1970]
- 7 Dickens in 1970 [1971]
- 8 Annotated English Novels? [1982]
- 9 Affective Intentions [1985]
- 10 Virtuoso Variations [1987]
- 11 Going Beyond the Repertory [1990]
- 12 A Little Local Irritation [1998]
- Index
8 - Annotated English Novels? [1982]
from Part 2 - On Dickens and Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 July 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Stephen Wall and Trollope
- Part 1 On Trollope
- Part 2 On Dickens and Others
- 3 [George Eliot and Her Readers] [1965]
- 4 Jane Austen's Judgments [1968]
- 5 Dickens: New Words and Old Opinions [1969]
- 6 [Dickens and His Readers] [1970]
- 7 Dickens in 1970 [1971]
- 8 Annotated English Novels? [1982]
- 9 Affective Intentions [1985]
- 10 Virtuoso Variations [1987]
- 11 Going Beyond the Repertory [1990]
- 12 A Little Local Irritation [1998]
- Index
Summary
Readers of Dombey and Son will remember this passage, from chapter 6, which describes the effects of railway development on Staggs's Gardens with all Dickens's characteristic relish for irrationality and metamorphosis:
The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood. Here, a chaos of carts, overthrown and jumbled together, lay topsyturvy at the bottom of a steep unnatural hill; there, confused treasures of iron soaked and rusted in something that had accidentally become a pond. Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height; temporary wooden houses and enclosures, in the most unlikely situations; carcases of ragged tenements, and fragments of unfinished walls and arches, and piles of scaffolding, and wildernesses of bricks, and giant forms of cranes, and tripods straddling above nothing. There were a hundred thousand shapes and substances of incompleteness, wildly mingled out of their places, upside down, burrowing in the earth, aspiring in the air, mouldering in the water, and unintelligible as any dream. Hot springs and fiery eruptions, the usual attendants upon earthquakes, lent their contributions of confusion to the scene. Boiling water hissed and heaved within dilapidated walls; whence, also, the glare and roar of flames came issuing forth; and mounds of ashes blocked up rights of way, and wholly changed the law and custom of the neighbourhood.
Would Dickens's first readers have recognized what he was talking about? Presumably so: as Humphry House pointed out long ago, the publication of Dombey coincided with the peak years of railway building, and many of those who bought the monthly numbers as they appeared between 1846 and 1848 were no doubt as used to such sights as we are to the remodellings of the landscape caused by motorway construction.
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- Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2018