Despite Oscar Wilde’s scorn for Victorian sentimentalism in general and Dickensian melodrama in particular,¹ the above lines might have been penned with the author of The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841) in mind. Hardly an image of Victorian London appears to us now clear of the fog, soot, and mud that seep through Dickens’s landscapes and transfix his at once unfathomable and indelible characters. As one critic wrote in a 1976 study of the author and his times, “[Victorian] history is today largely reconstructed from the scenes [Dickens] depicts and the human beings he perpetuates” (Chancellor 13). Aside from shaping the historical reality of his time for later readers, Dickens also presented narrative pathways, perspectival frames, and models of behavior that guided his contemporary audience toward understanding and finding their places within a newly developed, rapidly changing, industrial age in which factories, workhouses, poverty, pollution, crime, and disease confounded traditional values and practices. As the “first great novelist of the industrial city” (Ackroyd, London 11), Dickens urged his readers to leaven their lives with humor, assume critical agency, and look beyond their isolation to see their part in a common struggle against violations of justice and human dignity. If, as Lynda Nead has argued, modernity is “a set of processes and representations that were engaged in an urgent and inventive dialogue with their own historical conditions of existence” (8), Dickens was one of the most active facilitators of that dialogue, consulting with the immutabilities of emotional experience while recording the cacophony of cultural change. Testimonies to the success of his orchestration abound. “It is so graphic, so individual, and so true, that you could curtsey to all the people as you met them in the streets,” the novelist and Dickens contemporary Mary Russell Mitford remarked upon the appearance of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837). “I did not think there had been a place where English was spoken to which ’Boz’ had not penetrated. All the boys and girls talk his fun…and yet they who are of the highest taste like it the most” (qtd. in Ford 7). Mitford’s comment indicates not only Dickens’s widespread popularity (the sales totals of his serialized fiction averaged 40,000 copies per issue) but also the extent to which his narratives wove themselves into his readers’ daily lives. Victorians of various social classes at once recognized Dickens’s imagination of the absurd and found in it a fitting expression of their experiences. Indeed, when critics—Wilde among them—fault Dickens’s realism, pointing out the caricaturish nature of his depictions, they overlook the fact that reality often did not seem real to the Victorians and that they were frequently required to make leaps of imagination in order to function in their phenomenal world.

“London created Dickens just as Dickens created London” (London 7), writes Dickens biographer Peter Ackroyd. The London that Dickens brought to life in his fiction is one fraught with ambivalence—a place at once of thrilling adventure and deadening monotony; of high hopes and plunging disappointments. Such contradictory impressions of the city first made their mark in the mind of ten-year-old Dickens himself, whose relocation with his family from the port town of Chatham to the outskirts of London in 1822 marked an abrupt transition from childhood tranquility to humiliation and neglect:² “It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age,” Dickens wrote of the abrupt end to his formal education upon moving to Bayham Street, Camden Town. “It is wonderful to me that, even after my descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities: quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school” (Forster I: 21). Displaced by the pressures of his father’s accumulating debts, the young Dickens traded the classroom for the spectacle of a teeming metropolis whose rhythms and geography would prove fascinating objects of study. Dickens’s first biographer and close friend John Forster notes that the move to London gave the author his “first impression of that struggling poverty” (I: 12) and deprivation that would texture all of his novels, but Dickens’s writings also indicate his seduction by the streets and sights that would become the playground and prison of his adult imagination. “I wandered about the City, like a child in a dream, staring at the British merchants, and inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything,” Dickens wrote in his 1853 article “Gone Astray,” which recalls an early experience of being lost in London.

This description of his early wandering encapsulates much of Dickens’s fiction, which continually strives to “account for” sights that challenge comprehension. Indeed, the boy’s dream-shrouded journey through London replayed multiple times in Dickens’s adult life as he roamed the streets in periods of insomniac sympathy with the “restlessness of a great city” (Selected Journalism 73) that not only formed the backdrop for almost every one of his novels but also took on a life of its own as distinctive as any of the characters the novels housed.

That London should play a central role in Dickens’s writings is hardly surprising given both his intimate, lifelong connection with the place and its vibrant, multifaceted, and protean nature during the author’s lifetime (1812-1870). From the beginning of the century to its end, London’s population grew more than fourfold from 1 million to 4.5 million (Ackroyd, Dickens 17). Areas such as Camden Town, which were still developing and considered semirural when Dickens first came to the city, had been consumed in the burgeoning overflow of Greater London by the 1850s. Streets that flickered fitfully under oil lamps at the century’s start glowed steadily under gas lighting by the 1840s and, by the century’s close, shown brilliantly beneath electricity. Sewage that poured into the Thames and mixed with the city’s supply of drinking water in the 1820s had been contained and regulated by an underground sewer system by the 1860s.

But as modernity took shape over, around, and in the crevices of the city, it also spurred an aggregate of competing architectures, values, and time periods. Commercial buildings arose among the crumbling ruins of older, Elizabethan houses. The railway, which wound through the city by midcentury, created major schisms between old and new, order and chaos, while also connecting the urban center with suburban enclaves and wreaking havoc in settled areas. “Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground,” chronicles Dickens in Dombey and Son (1846-1848). “Everywhere were bridges that led nowhere; thoroughfares that were wholly impassable; Babel towers of chimneys, wanting half their height.…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” (120-21). Attempting to theorize the pandemonium of growth and disintegration that characterized Victorian London, Nead ventures that

With his descriptions of Babel towers and dead-end thoroughfares, Dickens never did—or, more likely, never even aspired to—dispel his hallucinatory vision of an industrialized London. Instead, his portrayals recall to readers a common vocabulary of childhood illusion and dream-logic in which they might contextualize—if not fully comprehend—the unnavigable spaces opening out and closing in around them.

Alterations to the city’s physical surfaces were but one visible manifestation of greater changes to the ethos and operation of the country as a whole. These changes included the First Reform Act (1832), which made extensive changes to the country’s electoral system; the abolition of slavery in British possessions (1833); the Factory Act (1833), which limited work hours for women and children; the first government grant in support of elementary education (1833); and the enactment of the New Poor Law Amendment Act (1834). The first and last of these were particularly contentious legislations with widespread repercussions. The former—the first of three Reform Acts during the nineteenth century—acknowledged the growing powers of the middle classes and the inadequacy of aristocratic patterns of governance. The Act extended the vote to upper-middle-class men, thereby increasing the percentage of adult males who were voters from 13 percent to 18 percent; reapportioned Parliamentary representation to more accurately reflect the constituent body; and eliminated “rotten boroughs”—those districts with so small an electorate that they did not warrant individual Parliamentary representation. In contrast to this move toward social equality, the New Poor Law Amendment Act deepened class divides. Intended to dissuade the poor from dependence on government aid, the Act included such measures as the prohibition of outdoor relief (i.e., relief for the poor from sources outside of workhouses); the stipulation that conditions in workhouses should be less preferable than those of the lowest-paid worker; and the abolition of rate-in-aid (i.e., grants to supplement low wages). Both of these acts contributed to the mobilization of the Chartist movement, which began in 1836 as a radical campaign in direct opposition to the New Poor Laws and demanded further Parliamentary reforms such as universal male suffrage and the abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament.

Working in the 1820s and 1830s as an independent shorthand reporter in Doctors Commons (a society of civil lawyers), as a Parliamentary reporter for The True Sun, and later as a freelance journalist for the ultraliberal daily The Morning Chronicle, the young Dickens honed his observational and writing skills while situated at the heart of these debates between the haves and the have-nots, the Whigs and the Tories. As Ackroyd notes, “Dickens was becoming deeply involved in the reporting of political affairs at precisely the time when the life of the nation was undergoing a profound change” (Dickens 135). His ambivalent political stance in later life testifies, perhaps, to his early journalistic exposure and attentiveness to all sides of an issue. On the one hand, he strongly opposed the New Poor Laws from the outset, thoroughly lambasting the system for its inhumanity in Oliver Twist (1837-1839) and, in an 1850 article for his journal Household Words, implying that a workhouse’s conditions can reduce its denizens to an animalistic state. “They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyaenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do,” he noted of the inhabitants of the youth ward. And later: “Groves of babies in arms; groves of mothers and other sick women in bed; groves of lunatics; jungles of men in stone-paved down-stairs day rooms, waiting for their dinners; longer and longer groves of old people, in up-stairs Infirmary wards, wearing out life” (Selected Journalism 242). A distaste for the animality latent in humankind is apparent in these condemnations of misguided government policy; however, it is this same disgust with primitivism that underlies Dickens’s objection to the Chartists, whose agenda would seem—on its surface—to correspond with Dickens’s own. “Although Dickens understood the grievances of those at the rough end of this new industrial age, he never sympathised with those who tried to create a revolutionary movement in England” (Dickens 326), observes Ackroyd. The Chartist movement too closely resembled the specter of mob rule that had haunted the British consciousness since the French Revolution and that Dickens continually condemned both in his private writings and in novels such as Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), Barnaby Rudge (1841), and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as monstrous, malicious, and barbaric.

These conflicting sentiments toward the revolutionary politics of his age have frustrated readers and critics who look in Dickens’s writing for a viable alternative to the institutions he critiques. But, as Andrew Sanders has stated: “Dickens was not primarily a social reformer or even a particularly sharp analyst of how and why reform was necessary” (49). And Ackroyd has noted: “His judgments were never formulated into a coherent system…and were not meant as the basis for any kind of ’thought’ on his part” (Dickens 174). It is precisely Dickens’s ambiguity that invigorates his fiction and constitutes its synchronicity with the polyphony of his age. “In his novels, by that act of general identification which makes him so much the most powerful writer of his period, he infuses the whole of the struggling middle-class with his own life and animation, so that instinctively he embodies their concerns and expresses the changes which were even then altering the country beyond recognition,” writes Ackroyd. “To say, therefore, that Dickens was ’radical’ in any party sense or in any ideological sense would be to mistake the unique nature of his perceptions” (Dickens 138).

One issue, however, upon which Dickens might be considered “radical”—insofar as that term implies passionate commitment to an ideal—was the proper treatment of children and the preservation of childhood. His absorption in the topic stemmed from his own brief time working in a blacking factory as a twelve-year-old before and during his father’s incarceration in the Marshalsea prison for nonpayment of debts. The experience has been documented so often that it has become legend, but Dickens no doubt tells it best in the fragmentary autobiography interpolated into Forster’s text:

While Dickens’s tenure in the factory lasted less than a year, the humiliation and disgust associated with the experience reverberated throughout his life, striking mournful chords in his fiction. His novels echo with the suppressed cries of children prematurely confronted with the responsibilities of adulthood. Oliver Twist is, from his birth, “the orphan of a workhouse—the humble, half-starved drudge—to be cuffed and buffeted through the world—despised by all, and pitied by none” (20-21). Both Caddy Jellyby and Charley are victims of parental neglect and overwork in Bleak House (1852-1853). Jenny Wren—the crippled doll’s dressmaker in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) —is almost unrecognizable as a little girl both to herself and everyone around her. “’What childhood did you ever leave me?’” (472) cries Edith Harker to her mother in Dombey and Son, voicing the plaint that any number of Dickens’s characters might lament to the adults and society responsible for robbing them of their childhoods. Dickens had a very clear ideal of what childhood should be like—carefree, innocent, unencumbered —but so forcefully did the realities of his experiences and observations intrude upon this ideal that almost none of his child characters are granted these favors. Indeed, even his vision of an ideal childhood uninterrupted by extraordinary events was clouded by his knowledge of its mutability: “Childhood is usually so beautiful and engaging, that, setting aside the many subjects of profound interest which it offers to an ordinarily thoughtful observer…there is a mournful shadow of the common lot, in the notion of its changing and fading into something else” (Selected Journalism 30). For Dickens, who, some critics have argued, never outgrew his childhood perceptions, the poignancy and interest of childhood lay precisely in its fleeting nature and the incompletion inherent within it.

Dickens’s vision of childhood was enforced not only by his personal experiences but also by the conditions and attitudes of his age. Throughout the nineteenth century, child labor was common in textile mills, coal mines, and factories, and, before the Factory Act of 1833, it was largely unregulated. A report on child labor in 1843 notes that “instances occur in which Children begin to work as early as three or four years of age; not infrequently at five, and between five and six; while, in general, regular employment commences between seven and eight; the great majority of the Children having begun to work before they are nine years old” (qtd. in Mitchell 43-44). Like Dickens, children were frequently employed to help support the family, and because small bodies could more easily maneuver in mine shafts, chimneys, and the tight spaces of machinery, they were particularly in demand in these dangerous occupations. However, as Sally Mitchell notes, “child labor was not invented by the Victorians.…What the Victorians did ’invent’ was concern for working children, and ultimately the legal means to protect them” (43). Such legislation was prompted by a larger shift in attitudes toward children and childhood that enabled and was furthered by Dickens’s imagination. James Kincaid —among others in the growing field of childhood studies—has argued that the phenomenon of the child is “contingent” and “determined” by historical circumstances (62), and it is largely agreed upon by critics that the nineteenth century witnessed a new focus on the child as a distinct entity from the adult. The child, states Kincaid, “became a conceptual and thus biological and social category…flowering in the nineteenth century” (61). As Kincaid and others such as Philippe Ariès point out, the Victorians busied themselves constructing, defining, and redefining this new category and institution of humanity. Discussing the extensive body of literature focused on this task, Kincaid states that “experts were not slow to complicate the complications, introducing, among other things, overlapping categories…where infancy extends through the first year; childhood, including that same period, advances to the end of the fourteenth year; boyhood and girlhood…cutting into that and running from age seven to twenty-one, a span that further takes in but is not limited to ’youth,’ ages fifteen to twenty-one” (69). These new, often shifting and colliding, categories were reinforced—and further confused—by legislation that set specific age limits and work hours for children, established and reestablished the age of consent (from ten to twelve at first, and then to thirteen and then, in 1885, to sixteen), prescribed rules for how children should be and behave, and made education at first more accessible and then mandatory.

Such historical details allow us to contextualize further the elusive image of the child that haunts Dickens’s fiction. On one hand, a plethora of children’s books and magazines, manuals about child rearing and child psychology, children’s clothing, and children’s toys were constructing an ideal of the child that was physically and intellectually segregated from adult spaces. On the other hand, the demand for child labor, rampant poverty, and unregulated child abuse throughout the century suggest the impossibility of clear distinctions between the realms of child and adult. Dickens’s uncannily mature children—Paul Dombey, Amy Dorrit, Jenny Wren—emphasize the tragedy of lost childhoods as well as reflect the ideological entanglements resulting from the Victorians’ production of this new category of human experience.

The problem of prostitution —or “fallen women”—also highlights the ambiguous line between child and adult during the Victorian period as well as the instability of the Victorian “angel of the house”—the period’s model woman, who is selflessly devoted to her children and husband. According to Ackroyd, the number of prostitutes in midcentury London was anywhere from 10,000 to 120,000 (Dickens 588), and a great number of them were what would now be considered grossly underage. According to Kincaid, streetwalkers were as young as eight or nine years of age. Quite often, these girls were born and raised in neighborhoods in which brothels were simply part of the landscape, and the sex industry presented itself to them as a viable means of income for supporting themselves and their families. While the youth of these women did not greatly concern the Victorians until late in the century, according to Kincaid, Victorians did recognize prostitution as a problem. The popular satirical weekly Punch identified it as “The Great Social Evil” in an 1857 cartoon; furthermore, literature and art of the period abound with “fallen women” who are duped into the profession (e.g., Marian Erle in Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh [1856]) or who succumb to their desires for love and money (e.g., Jenny in Dante Gabriel-Rossetti’s eponymous poem [1870] and his painting Found [1859]). A number of modern critics have analyzed the nature of the threat prostitutes were perceived to pose to the ideal domestic woman, who was “’naturally’ self-sacrificing and self-regulating [and] radiated morality because her ’substance’ was love, not self-interest or ambition” (Poovey 8). Mary Poovey argues that the prostitute not only threatened this domestic ideal but also undermined the “consolidation of bourgeois power [and] economic success” (10) founded upon the sequestration of the domestic, female sphere. That not all women confined their activities to this idealized space is evident from the fact that prostitutes constituted an integral part of the urban scene. According to Judith Walkowitz, the prostitute was “a logo of the divided city itself…[and] brought into relief the class structure and general social distribution of London.…[Prostitutes] stood in stark opposition to the classical elite bodies of female civil statuary that graced the city squares: they were female grotesques, evocative of the chaos and illicit secrets of the labyrinthine city” (Dreadful Delight 21-22). Despite the physical, moral, and ideological threats posed by prostitution, however, Victorians hesitated to pass laws to curtail the sex trade. Two bills that would have done so—the Brothels Suppression Bill (1840) and the Bill for Protection of Females (1848) —failed to pass. Not until the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866, and 1869 did prostitution come under legal oversight, and these highly controversial laws were instituted for the protection of military officials and their families from venereal diseases (primarily syphilis). By and large, then, prostitution was not illegal, and police had limited control over prostitutes’ actions. Walkowitz notes: “Authorities were mainly concerned to impose a certain level of public decorum on prostitutes, to contain them within certain areas, and to break up collusions between prostitutes and thieves” (Prostitution and Victorian Society 14). Such reluctance to impose legislation could have stemmed, as Trevor Fisher suggests, from government unwillingness to interfere in individual affairs. Whatever the reason, this relatively unregulated social problem became a point of fascination for writers and artists whose depictions of prostitutes tended to combine prurient and philanthropic interests.

Dickens was among the most fascinated of these writers. His Home for Homeless Women, established in 1847 in partnership with the wealthy philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, was Dickens’s intimate concern for twelve years. His efforts on behalf of the Home—also called Urania Cottage —included researching similar institutions throughout England and France to determine the best system for such a venture; personally interviewing each of the residents before admission; and deciding on appropriate activities and clothing for the Home’s thirteen wards. The early goal of the Home was to rehabilitate women criminals —primarily prostitutes —and prepare them for emigration, resettlement, and, preferably, marriage. Dickens firmly believed that the last was the best method of rehabilitation. He wrote: “I can certainly descry a kind of active repentance in their being faithful wives and mothers of virtuous children” (qtd. in Collins, Dickens and Crime 114). However, despite his enthusiasm for the project, Dickens’s efforts were not as successful as he hoped. The first boatload of emigrants to Australia took up their trade again on the ship and by 1853 only about half of the girls who had been through the home had been successfully rehabilitated. Dickens’s evaluation of the characters of the girls in his Home indicates the difficulty of the task he set himself. In a letter to Burdett-Coutts, he notes: “There is no doubt that many of them would go on well for some time, and would then be seized with a violent fit of the most extraordinary passion, apparently quite motiveless, and insist on going away. There seems to be something inherent in their course of life, which engenders and awakens a sudden restlessness and recklessness which may be long suppressed, but breaks out like madness” (qtd. in Collins, Dickens and Crime 108). It is possible to conjecture that in his portrayals of fictional prostitutes, Dickens attempted to counteract the frequent disappointments of his actual experiences with the Home. While fits of madness, relapses, and desertions were not uncommon at Urania Cottage, Dickens’s fictional prostitutes are as a whole repentant, kindhearted, and excused from any responsibility for their downfalls. Nancy, in Oliver Twist, falls to prostitution after a childhood career as a pickpocket, but she gives her life saving Oliver. Alice Marwood in Dombey and Son is also a victim of childhood abuse, but as a grown woman, “there shone through all her wayworn misery and fatigue, a ray of the departed radiance of the fallen angel” (572). And David Copperfield’s little Em’ly is seduced by Steerforth but granted a new life in Australia under the doting care of Mr. Peggotty. Dickens’s fictional fallen women thus serve as testaments to the resilient goodness of the human spirit in spite of corruptive environmental forces—as well as to their author’s strong belief in the efficacy of the “angel of the house” as an ideal. While Dickens’s optimistic outlook may not have been born out wholly by his experience—and may, as some critics have argued, reinforce a limiting gender divide—his work as a writer seeks to encourage readers to overcome their social biases and search for the humanity in even the most seemingly depraved of their associates.

Prostitution was only one—albeit consuming—facet of Dickens’s larger interest in crime and law enforcement. This broader interest undoubtedly arose in part from his devastating early experiences with his father’s incarceration as well as from his youthful stint as a court reporter. But his fascination with crime went beyond a humanitarian quest for justice or a commitment to penal reforms (which were numerous in his time). “His interest in punishment was equaled only by his interest in the crimes which provoked it,” notes Ackroyd, “in particular he was always fascinated by murders and murder trials” (Dickens 313). Like many others in his time, Dickens’s morbid imagination was provoked and facilitated by the media’s sensationalization of violent crimes. The midcentury removal of what were known as “taxes on knowledge” (such as the stamp, advertisement, and paper duties) as well as the extension of the railway expedited news circulation and encouraged journalists to take advantage of any potentially rousing event. Papers such as The Newgate Calendar, The Police Gazette, and the News of the World combined with widely distributed portraits of famous criminals and tours of crime scenes to create a popular industry around crime and its accoutrements. Dickens’s own journal All the Year Round (founded in 1859) hosted some of the most successful sensation novels, including Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859-1860) and his own Great Expectations (1860-1861). It is important to keep in mind, however, that while sensation novels and plays, the sensation press, and the overpopulation of cities might point toward a significant spike in crime during the nineteenth century, evidence suggests that that Victorian period actually experienced less crime than previous eras and that Victorian crimes tended to be less violent. According to Sally Mitchell, “About 90 percent of the cases serious enough to go to trial were crimes against property. Riots, brutal robberies, and murders became uncommon [as the century progressed]. In London in the 1890s, with a population of five million people, there were only about twenty homicides per year” (96). These statistics pointing to decreasing crime rates are, however, frequently overshadowed by the public’s hunger for sensational stories and the print industry’s eagerness to deliver them.

The 1840 murder of Lord William Russell by his Swiss butler Francois Courvoisier, for example, created a media uproar that fed a countrywide fascination with the suave, charismatic murderer. Dickens himself was not immune to the excitement surrounding the case, and on the day of Courvoisier’s execution, he joined the 40,000 spectators to watch the convict’s hanging. “It was so loathsome, pitiful and vile a sight, that the law appeared to be as bad as he, or worse; being much the stronger, and shedding around it a far more dismal contagion” (qtd. in Diamond 157), Dickens reflected in an 1846 article for The Daily News that argued against the death penalty. But while he might have been repulsed by the vileness of prurient, public interest in such affairs, Dickens nevertheless frequently indulged his own fascination with crime and the criminal mind. “He readily identified himself, in imagination, with [criminals’] aggressive activities, but would also strongly repudiate this sympathy by extolling their adversaries, the police, and by demanding severe punishment for offenders against the law” (Dickens and Crime 1), Philip A. W. Collins notes. These conflicting impulses of sympathy and self-repudiation were acted out not only in his many fictional portraits of criminals and their apprehenders (for example, in Oliver Twist, Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood) but also through his involvement with the Metropolitan Police—an institution established in 1829 by Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel that enacted a definitive tactical and philosophical shift from criminal apprehension to crime prevention. Dickens embarked on many nighttime excursions with Police Inspector Charles Field—a figure whom the author idealized in his writing and upon whom Inspector Bucket of Bleak House is based. “Inspector Field’s eye is the roving eye that searches every corner of the cellar as he talks,” writes Dickens in his article “On Duty with Inspector Field”:

The hyperbolic descriptions here reveal an underlying fascination with power—both the power of the criminal underground and the power of those capable of suppressing it. Indeed, it is precisely the charisma and tantalizing appeal of Dickens’s imaginary criminals (Magwitch, Fagin, Orlick, John Jasper, Hortense) that necessitated his exaggerated portraits of authority figures like Field (and his fictional counterpart Bucket). For Dickens, confidence in the power of the police both enabled voyeuristic criminal fantasies and offered the reassurance of timely salvation.

For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, reform for criminals and the state’s salvation entailed the transportation of offenders to penal colonies—first to America and then, after America gained independence, to penal settlements in Australia. While his fiction concerned itself primarily with England in general and London in particular, Dickens’s fascination with criminal affairs, his involvement in Urania Cottage, and the career removal of his sons to stations abroad brought him into contact with the greater panorama of England’s imperial interests. These were considerable. Expanding to cover nearly a quarter of the world’s landmass by the mid-twentieth century, England eventually developed into the largest empire in modern history. “The British Empire arose more through commerce than through planned conquest,” notes Mitchell.

Owing to its growing empire and the strength of its industrial advancements (extravagantly displayed by the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851), a sense of national pride worked its way into the British identity during the nineteenth century. As Pip wryly reflects in Great Expectations: “We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything” (187).

Dickens’s own participation in the celebration of Empire was measured. In his novels, England’s foreign territories and involvements are continually shoved into margins that ambivalently hint at salvation and hope as well as danger and corruption. Magwitch is exiled to an unseen Australia, and Pip as well departs off-stage to make his fortune in a nebulous East. Little Em’ly and Alice Marwood are both transported to New South Wales, but their experiences there are left largely untold. Portraits of opium dens in Edwin Drood (1870) indicate Dickens’s anxiety about the corruptive effects of intimate relations with strange, far-flung lands but also hint at a fascination with the unknown and unknowable. When characters express interest in colonial concerns—as does Mrs. Jellyby for Borrioboola Gha—they are criticized for sacrificing their duties to their homes in exchange for misguided philanthropic schemes. It was this fear of neglecting the center for the periphery that discouraged Dickens from focusing his fictional efforts on affairs abroad.

His belief in the necessity of a strong home nation and his increasing frustration with England’s mismanagement of its foreign relations—as demonstrated by the Crimean War and the tragedy of the 1857 Indian Mutiny—is hinted at everywhere in his novels and voiced explicitly in his articles and letters. As Grace Moore explains, “While he [Dickens] supported the self-sufficient colonies of settlement, he deeply resented any involvement with independent colonies, requiring efforts that he felt could be put to better use at home and distracting bureaucrats from the ameliorative work necessary in the mother country” (3). For Dickens, as for many of his readers, the territories of the greater Empire were fantastical places that manifested in daily life only through marvelous imported objects, travelers’ tall tales, and, sometimes, news of relatives either prospering or dying (Dickens’s own son Walter died in India in 1863). The dubious sketches in Dickens’s fiction of foreign places like India and Australia mirror the unclear conceptions of these spaces in the minds of his readers and vividly contrast with the clarity and detail of his accounts of London —a place that, for Dickens and his readers, was as marvelous, multifaceted, entertaining, and tragic as anything the wider world had to offer.

While, as Ackroyd claims, Dickens was “unmistakably an early Victorian” (Dickens 1080) in his values, temperament, and visions, his responses to the nineteenth century’s political, social, and industrial changes reflect more broadly the psychological and philosophical difficulties of adjusting to rapidly changing external circumstances. Later Victorians and early-twentieth-century writers might (and did) scoff at Dickens’s open emotionality and idealism, but the alternative of an age devoid of such impulses presents a bleak image indeed. The widespread, transatlantic mourning at Dickens’s passing in 1870 indicates the loss not just of a man but also of the whole vision he represented—a vision of a world that, despite chaos and change, could still find meaning and cohesion, if only in the resilience of individual spirit and effort. “We have no doubt whatever that much of the active benevolence of the present day, the interest in humble persons and humble things, and the desire to seek out and relieve every form of misery is due to the influence of [Dickens’s] works” (in Collins, Critical Heritage 508), stated a leading article in the Times, published soon after Dickens’s death. While it would be a mistake to characterize Dickens unequivocally as a philanthropist, his efforts to “maintain a vision of the coherence of the world, a vision of some central human continuity,” as Ackroyd puts it (Dickens 1082), urged his readers to maintain their humanity in an increasingly mechanized world. It is, no doubt, not only the panoramic representation of his times in his novels but also this same emphatic preservation of the human that constitutes Dickens’s continued attraction for our own age.

Works Cited