Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time"Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time clarifies the antinomies that appear in Dickens's attitudes toward the past, present, and future. To do this, author James E. Marlow follows Dickens's personal and literary development through all his novels and many of his letters and journalistic pieces. For example, toward the past Dickens reveals diametrically opposing attitudes. A part of his own childhood was so painful a memory to him that he could not bring himself to tell his wife about it after twenty years of marriage. In his novels he developed a number of ways of dealing with the awful pasts, both personal and national. From denial to anger to acceptance, Dickens tried one method after another. As each failed to relieve his anguish, and even failed to rescue human feelings, he formulated another. This is what Marlow calls Dickens's "dialectic of the past."" "Yet Dickens was also nostalgic about much of the past. He emphasized its softening quality even while trying to disarm its dehumanizing quality. With his characters Dickens discovered the necessity of an engagement with the past that entails accepting the pain as well as the joy. This is its use. The past is abused when the pain or joy is disentangled from the whole and held up as meaning in itself. This act orphans the feelings, petrifying the soul." "What is true of the past is true of the present and future as well. Just as one chapter of the book is devoted to the abuse of the past and another to its uses, a further chapter shows the way Dickens worked through the terrors of the present, dominated by an ideology that the author calls "English cannibalism." Another chapter shows the threat of moral sclerosis through dealing with the future as merely "great expectations." These chapters are paired with chapters that show the joys of the present and future. With each time period there is a dialectical process: Dickens had to work through a stance, discover its deficiencies, and then move on to another stance that promised to provide more human gain, both social and personal, from the past, present, and future. Ultimately, the very existence of three dimensions of time is the solace of man, because while the past, for example, can be used for relief of the present, the present can modify and soften the past. All is fluid, and nothing is ever finished in the process between mind and human events." "In the last chapter Marlow established the kind of material world that Dickens's dialectic of time presupposed. It is a world with moral foundations, and Dickens, like many other Victorians, discovered a plausible, scientific explanation for such a world in Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, a book that seeks to harmonize scientific knowledge with moral imperatives. This satisfies Dickens's own project perfectly, for Dickens wished to demonstrate the possibilities of engagements with each dimension of time, within the requirements of social life, that do not annihilate the moral properties necessary for the soul to harmonize with God's universe itself."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved |
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Page 21
... themes . While acknowledging that words do not contain a mean- ing , I propose to argue that fewer errors of interpretation are likely to occur if one stays within Dickens's circle of signifiers than if one were to translate his themes ...
... themes . While acknowledging that words do not contain a mean- ing , I propose to argue that fewer errors of interpretation are likely to occur if one stays within Dickens's circle of signifiers than if one were to translate his themes ...
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... theme of necessity , which is made evident to the reader in other ways . While the bridges have poetic value then— cross - referencing to the world of words — they are also visible in the quotidian world ; the reader is able to locate ...
... theme of necessity , which is made evident to the reader in other ways . While the bridges have poetic value then— cross - referencing to the world of words — they are also visible in the quotidian world ; the reader is able to locate ...
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Contents
9 | |
11 | |
13 | |
Charles Dickens | 31 |
The Abuses of Time | 33 |
The Dead Hand of the Past | 35 |
The Presence of Hunger | 69 |
Great Expectations Fixtures of the Future | 96 |
The Battle of Life | 125 |
Trust in the Present | 154 |
Beyond Forgetting The Uses of the Past | 191 |
Conclusion | 221 |
Transcending Time Out of the Ruined Place | 223 |
Notes | 241 |
Bibliography | 255 |
Index | 263 |
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accept Ackroyd action argued Babbage Barnaby Rudge battle Bella Bleak House Boffin Bounderby called cannibalism carelessness Carlyle characters Charles Dickens Christmas Books Chuzzlewit circumstances Clennam comic critics David Copperfield dead hand deprivation desire Dick Dickens showed Dickens Studies Annual Dickens wrote Dickens's novels dinner Dombey Dombey and Son duty England English cannibalism evil example expectations father feelings fiction future Gradgrind Headstone heart hope Household Words human Ibid idea ideology of hunger imagination individual influence Jarndyce John Little Dorrit living Lizzie London Malthus Malthusian Martin Chuzzlewit means Merdle Miss moral Mutual Friend nature never Nickleby Old Curiosity Shop Oliver Oliver Twist pain past Peter Ackroyd phatic physical Pickwick Pickwick Papers Pip's plot present Quilp Ralph reader Rigaud Sartor Resartus says Scrooge seems sense simply social society spirit stance Steerforth symbol Tale theme things tion University Press Victorian voracity Wrayburn York
Popular passages
Page 146 - For, don't you mark ? we're made so that we love First when we see them painted, things we have passed Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see; And so they are better, painted — better to us, Which is the same thing. Art was given for that; God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out.
Page 77 - Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months ; at last they got so voracious and wild -with hunger, that one boy: who was tall for his age, and hadn't been used to that sort of thing...
Page 226 - Every atom impressed with good and with ill retains at once the motions which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.
Page 55 - There are, at Chesney Wold this January week, some ladies and gentlemen of the newest fashion, who have set up a Dandyism — in Religion, for instance. Who, in mere lackadaisical want of an emotion, have agreed upon a little dandy talk about the Vulgar wanting faith in things in general ; meaning, in the things that have been tried and found wanting, as though a low fellow should unaccountably lose faith in a bad shilling, after finding it out ! Who would make the Vulgar very picturesque and faithful,...
Page 227 - Almighty stamped on the brow of the first murderer, the indelible and visible mark of his guilt ; he has also established laws by which every succeeding criminal is not less irrevocably chained to the testimony of his crime ; for every atom of his mortal frame, through whatever changes its several particles may migrate, will still retain, adhering to it through every combination, some movement derived from that very muscular effort by which the crime itself was perpetrated.
Page 120 - Science, this discovery is an old one ; but in most others it belongs wholly to these latter days. How often, in former ages, by eternal Creeds, eternal Forms of Government and the like, has it been attempted, fiercely enough, and with destructive violence, to chain the Future under the Past ; and say to the Providence, whose ways with man are mysterious, and through the great deep : Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther ! A wholly insane attempt ; and for man himself, could it prosper, the frightfulest...
Page 191 - So, still within this life, though lifted o'er its strife, Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last, " This rage was right i' the main, that acquiescence vain : The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.
Page 208 - A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!