TRP and Dickens

[Doug Millison]

We've had several references to Dickens in GRGR so far. Perhaps I'm
over-sensitive, but I can't help but hear echoes of TRP as I read these
descriptions (below) of papers to be given at the upcoming Dickens Universe
conference, part of a post on DICKNS-L today:

John Bowen: "History's Grip: The Event of *Barnaby Rudge*."
        In this paper I want to talk about time and the historical event in
*Barnaby Rudge*. The novel is, in many ways, an untimely text - in its
birth, reception and subsequent history. It is also a deeply repetitive
novel, both in its own narrative and its depiction of historical and
psychic processes. It often appears in the book as if consciousness and
historical agency are simply the prey of strange hauntings and compulsions
to repeat. History and families alike are crossed by uncanny forces, in
particular the power of ghosts and dreams, and the forward movement of the
narrative is constantly arrested or blocked by doublings and repetitions.
These hauntings trouble the boundaries between the human and the inhuman
and the book is drawn to figures - the living dead, an idiot, a talking
bird - which are usually at the very margins of historical understanding. I
would like to link this, through Dickens^s correspondence, to his wish to
write a sublime history, one that can transport the reader to a state of
mind beyond reason and representation; a kind of writing that is adequate
to the force of historical trauma.

Patrick Brantlinger: "Did Dickens have a Philosopy of History?"
        Ever since R. H. Horne labeled Dickens "an instinctive writer" and
Walter Bagehot said that he was "utterly deficient in the faculty of
reasoning," it has been the assumption of most Dickens critics that,
however marvelous he may have been as a novelist, he was anything but a
systematic thinker.  So entrenched is this view that even to ask if Dickens
had a philosophy of history may sound preposterous.    But though Dickens
wasn't Hegel, Macaulay, Marx, or Mill, perhaps he was the novel-writing
version of Carlyle?  --Another common assumption is  that, if Dickens did
hold any systematic ideas about the past, he got them from Carlyle.  After
all, Dickens acknowledged the influence of Carlyle's history of the French
Revolution on his second historical novel, *A Tale of Two Cities*, and also
said toward the end of his career that Carlyle was the thinker "who had
influenced him most" (qtd. in Ackroyd 301).
        What about his first historical novel, *Barnaby Rudge*, however,
which Dickens conceived and wrote very early in his career?  Though it,
too, may have been influenced by Carlyle, Dickens's historical sources were
many and various.  Moreover, the fact that he should write a historical
novel at all, and especially so soon after *Pickwick*, suggests that
Dickens held some quite definite views about history, historiography, and
historical fiction.  But if the main influence on *Tale of Two Cities* was
Carlyle, a key influence on *Barnaby Rudge* was Sir Walter Scott.
        Yet while Dickens may have set out to rival Scott by writing a
historical novel, and while Dickens's depiction of the Gordon riots partly
echoes Scott's depiction of the Porteous riot in *Heart of Midlothian*,
*Barnaby Rudge* is quite different from any of Scott's novels in its
conceptualization of the past and of the trajectory of history from past to
present.  Another commonplace about both *Barnaby Rudge* and *Tale of Two
Cities* is that they are only superficially about the past-that they are
really "tracts for their times" more than genuinely historical works of
fiction.  The Gordon Riots equal Chartism, Simon Tappertit's union equals
"Glasgow Thuggery," the anti-Catholicism of 1780 equals the Protestant
Association of 1839, and so forth.  It is precisely the habit or pattern of
anachronism, which involves seeing in the present the threat, at least, of
a repetition of the past, that is one key difference between Dickens and
Scott.  Paradoxically, Scott emerges from the comparison as in some sense
more liberal than Dickens, or anyway as having a firmer faith in progress.
        In pointing out that, when writing about the past, Dickens is often
anachronistic, Humphry House long ago also noted that "Among the false
book-backs with which [Dickens] decorated his study at Gad's Hill was a set
called: `The Wisdom of our Ancestors--I. Ignorance. II. Superstition. III.
The Block.  IV.  The Stake.  V. The Rack.  VI. Dirt.  VII. Disease'" (House
35).
        Taking this fake set of history tomes as one of my starting points,
I will explore several issues that relate to the general question of
whether or not Dickens had a philosophy of history, including what he had
to say about the practice of historical fiction and also whether or not he
had any strong beliefs, at least, about the past that he held consistently
from the beginning to the end of his career.  Of the various historians
besides Carlyle whom Dickens read, Henry Thomas Buckle is the one who
espoused a liberal philosophy of history that Dickens most explicitly
agreed with.  Buckle's liberalism contradicts Carlyle's authoritarianism in
many ways, so part of the answer must be to decide whether Dickens was able
to recognize and at least try to think through these contradictions, or
instead simply shuttled back and forth between them as occasion demanded.
Besides *Barnaby Rudge* and *Tale of Two Cities*, I will examine a number
of Dickens's other writings that reflect upon history, including "The Fine
Old English Gentleman," A *Child's History of England*, and his essay on
Pre-Raphaelitism, "Old Lamps for New Ones."  I will also illustrate my
lecture with several slides.

d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com