Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Acknowledgments
- Contents
- Volume XVII 2009
- Editorial Note
- The Founding and the Founder: Medievalism and the Legacy of Leslie J. Workman
- Medievalism: Its Linguistic History in Nineteenth-Century Britain
- Medievalism and Medieval Reception: A Terminological Question
- Medievalisms and Why They Matter
- Medievalism, Authority, and the Academy
- The Tropes of Medievalism
- Medievalism and the Middle Ages
- Medievalism from Here
- A Steam-Whistle Modernist?: Representations of King Alfred in Dickens's A Child's History of England and The Battle of Life
- Writing Medieval Women (and Men): Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter
- J. K. Rowling's Medieval Bestiary
- Seamus Heaney's Audio Beowulf: An Analysis of the Omissions
- The King's Phantom: Staging Majesty in Bale's Kynge Johan
- Rodelinda Goes Opera: The Lombard Queen's Journey from Medieval Backstage to Händel's “dramma per musica”
- The Ring of the Nibelung and the Nibelungenlied: Wagner's Ambiguous Relationship to a Source
- Notes on Contributors
- Previously published volumes
Summary
The Victorians' attraction to the Middle Ages is a well-documented phenomenon. Charles Dellheim, for instance, has noted the paradox that as the Victorians became more technologically advanced, their fascination with the “preindustrial past and in particular its medieval inheritance” increased. In addition to numerous Gothic railway termini, Londoners at mid-century would have been able to watch the construction of All Saints Church on Margaret Street (1849), view the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit at the Royal Academy (1851), and tour Pugin's Medieval Court at the Great Exhibition (1851). Strangely, however, Charles Dickens, one of Victorian England's most paradigmatic authors, seems largely to have resisted this typical impulse to idealize, use, and abuse the Middle Ages. Yet if in his major novels Dickens seems not to have any particular relation to the Middle Ages, some of his minor works suggest more specific engagements with the past, and particularly with the question of how the Victorians should relate to and narrate it. Not only does he explicitly demonstrate a version of historiography in A Child's History of England (1851), but he imports his favorite figure from English history, King Alfred, in the fourth of his five Christmas books, The Battle of Life (1846). Beyond this, he criticizes the ways in which some of his contemporaries, the Pre-Raphaelites, handled history in their own work. A reader would be hard-pressed, however, to find a coherent philosophy of history in Dickens's works, for his statements about the medieval past remain irreducibly, yet interestingly, irreconcilable.
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- Information
- Studies in Medievalism XVIIDefining Medievalism(s), pp. 92 - 111Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009