In 2002 the novelist and critic Jane Smiley observed, “The literary sensibility of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented literary sensibility in history” (1). In fact, over the past 175 years there had emerged in both the popular press and academic circles what Lyn Pykett and others have described as “the Dickens industry” (2), an enterprise in which a veritable army of critics have offered widely diverse judgments on the merits of Dickens’s fiction. At one time or another Dickens has been variously celebrated as one of the greatest English novelists and vilified as a caricaturist who relied on contrived plots and sentimental stories for his success. Critics have declared him a genius and a sham.

Even before his death, the sky-high reputation Dickens garnered with his early novels had begun to fall; it reached its nadir after World War I, when his work was considered fit only for what Leslie Stephen called “the half-educated” (935). His work began to receive serious attention during the 1940s, and since that date his stock has steadily risen. Today it seems safe to say that his place among the giants of fiction is secure. Nevertheless, the circuitous path of Dickens criticism is noteworthy not only for what it says about the novelist but also for what it reveals about the path of literary criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Opinion of Dickens’s Contemporaries

Even before he published his first novel, Dickens was being heralded by the British reading public as a new voice in literature. His Sketches by Boz (1836) earned him praise for his keen wit and ability to depict the lower classes with startling fidelity. The serialized publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-1837) made him a household word, and reviewers compared his work with that of Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, and even William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. The most extraordinary aspect of his popularity, one reviewer noted, was “the recognition” he received “from persons of the most refined taste, as well as from the great mass of the reading public” (Buller 55).¹ The appearance of Oliver Twist (1837-1839) and Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839) helped that reputation grow even more, although reviewer Abraham Hayward did express reservations about the future: Dickens “has risen like the rocket,” Hayward wrote, but if he continues to write so quickly and haphazardly, “he will come down like the stick” (62).

Some evidence of that falling off appears in reviews of his next two novels, The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841) and Barnaby Rudge (1841), and was not helped at all by his decision to publish his observations on his first trip to America, American Notes (1842), which some critics saw as mean-spirited. The general public continued to read him avidly, although sales slumped for Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844). Dickens’s decision in 1843 to begin publishing shorter works for sale at Christmas eventually won back readers and drew numerous favorable comments. E. L. Blanchard warned other critics that the tale was “not to be talked about or written of according to ordinary rules” (86). William Makepeace Thackeray, not yet famous in his own right as a novelist, was in awe. “Who can listen to objections,” he asked in a Fraser’s Magazine review, “regarding such a book as this?” (166). However, Dickens’s next novel, Dombey and Son (1846-1848), showed signs of a darker intelligence at work in its scrutiny of British society, and reviews were mixed. Dickens was able to recapture the hearts of his countrymen (and American readers) with his semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1849-1850), so much so that a reviewer for Fraser’s Magazine could assert boldly that though “innumerable reputations have flared up and gone out,” the “name and fame of Charles Dickens have been exempt from all vicissitude” (“Charles Dickens” 251).

Unfortunately, that euphoria did not last. The novels that followed David Copperfield were, like Dombey and Son, dark commentaries on English society, and the public turned away from them. Bleak House (1852-1853) was pilloried for “absolute want of construction” (Brimley 295); Hard Times was dismissed by some as “stale, flat, and unprofitable, a mere dull melodrama” (Simpson 319). Little Dorrit (1855-1857) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859) fared no better, as evidenced by the particularly harsh judgments rendered by James Fitzjames Stephen, who remarked that the former novel is characterized by a “cumbrous and confused” plot and “rather uninteresting characters” presented in a style “often strained to excess” (“License” 378). The latter, he wrote in another review, demonstrates again how Dickens has been able to “infect the literature of his country with a disease” that corrupts long-held standards of literary taste (“Tale” 41). Great Expectations (1860-1861) marked something of a comeback for Dickens among the critics of his time. American critic Edwin Whipple asserted that it demonstrates that “Dickens is now in the prime, and not in the decline of his great powers” (442), while British reviewer E. S. Dallas thought the novel should be “ranked among his happiest” (443). Dallas also praised Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) as “one of his finest works, and one in which on occasion he even surpasses himself” (6). Unfortunately, the novel prompted a return of harsh critical judgments, the most famous being that of the young Henry James, who complained about its loose organization and superficial characterization. James concluded his review by offering a summary judgment that would stand for nearly half a century: it would be “an offense against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists” (159).

Nadir and Rebound

The growing feeling of revulsion toward the Victorians’ sentimentality and moral earnestness greatly affected Dickens’s reputation for nearly seventy years after his death in 1870. While a cadre of fans celebrated the publication of John Forster’s three-volume Life of Charles Dickens (1872-1874), the trend in criticism was to dismiss Dickens as either intellectually shallow or technically inept. George Henry Lewes, in his 1872 essay “Dickens in Relation to Criticism,” offers a representative opinion when he finds in the novels “the substitution of mechanisms for minds, puppets for characters” (148). “Thought,” Lewes says, “is strangely absent” from Dickens’s work (151). The prolific and respected critic George Saintsbury complained of Dickens’s “lack of anything like real acquaintance or sympathy with great and high regions of thought” (743). Perhaps the best gauge of the shift in sensibility is Oscar Wilde’s witty but insightful observation about the much-harassed heroine of The Old Curiosity Shop:“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing” (qtd. in Beckson 163).

Among the few supporters of Dickens’s fiction during this period who made lasting critical contributions were George Gissing and G. K. Chesterton, both novelists themselves, who defended the author against the growing body of detractors. In Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898) Gissing examines Dickens’s novels not simply as social commentaries but as works of art, finding Dickens a great but flawed artist who “had not the tragic gift” (149). Chesterton goes even further in celebrating the convivial side of Dickens, suggesting in Charles Dickens (1906) that the author is “a mythologist rather than a novelist” (38) and should not be judged by the usual critical standards. For three decades Chesterton celebrated what might be called the “Christmas Dickens,” whose innate sense of hope and good cheer sets him apart from his dour Victorian contemporaries. Chesterton was certainly not alone. In 1902 a group of devoted fans formed the Dickens Fellowship to perpetuate interest in his work. Much of what they initially published, however, is largely antiquarian and lacks critical rigor as most early Dickensians were content to accept Dickens’s genius as a given and his humor as the mark of his greatness. A notable dissenter to that majority view was the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who may be said to have initiated the strand of criticism that focuses on the “dark Dickens.” Shaw detects a strand of earnestness in Dickens’s work that evidences a deep discontent with the social order he ostensibly celebrates. Read carefully, Shaw says, one discovers that “Little Dorrit is a far more seditious book than Das Kapital” (51), and Hard Times reveals Dickens’s realization that “it is not our disorder but our order that is horrible” (29). T. S. Eliot comes close to joining Shaw’s camp when he declares that Bleak House, a searing exposé of society, is Dickens’s best novel.

Most moderns found Dickens’s novels too haphazardly constructed and too shallow in characterization to be worthy of serious consideration as literature. Ford Madox Ford dismisses them by observing, “My father thought Dickens was vulgar” (108). Aldous Huxley concludes even more caustically that “the quality of Dickens’ sentimentality” is “truly pathological” (59). David Cecil claims his work contains “a great deal that is bad” (27), and, furthermore, that Dickens had “no sense of form” and an “uncertain grasp of character” (46). With the rise of psychoanalytic criticism in the 1920s, Dickens criticism took a turn toward ad hominem argument as these critical tools were often applied to discern the character and mental state of the novelist rather than elucidate fictional characters. Thomas Wright’s Life of Charles Dickens (1935) publicized the novelist’s late-life affair with the actress Ellen Ternan and spawned a handful of highly derogatory character studies that painted Dickens as a selfish hypocrite who, by extension, could not be relied upon for accurate portraits of his times. Hugh Kingsmill’s devastating portrait in The Sentimental Journey: A Life of Charles Dickens (1934) presents Dickens as a vain, self-centered, immature, and mediocre writer.

At the end of the 1930s, however, two studies signaled a shift in temperament and ushered in a new wave of critical appreciation. George Orwell’s essay on Dickens in Inside the Whale (1940) may seem at first to be another litany of the novelist’s faults. But Orwell insists Dickens deserves to be read for both his technical ability to make use of “the unnecessary detail” (59) and for his moral ability to celebrate “the native decency of the common man” (65). Edmund Wilson’s portrait in “Dickens: The Two Scrooges” (1941) suggests that the writer was a tormented soul alienated from society and that his novels are actually stinging critiques of the world that he is supposed to have celebrated. Wilson’s readings paved the way for criticism that privileged the later, darker novels and that valorized Dickens as an artist estranged from the social order of his time.

Dickens’s “Dark” and “Light”

In 1941, a breakthrough of sorts occurred in the history of Dickens criticism with the publication of Humphry House’s The Dickens World, the first book on Dickens published by an academic press. But where House defends Dickens’s place among the important novelists of his day, the iconoclastic and highly opinionated F. R. Leavis took specific pains to omit him from The Great Tradition (1948), declaring that Dickens’s fiction lacks the high seriousness and sustained criticism of life necessary to rank with works by writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Henry James. Still, American critics of the time tended to follow House and Wilson in according Dickens high marks for his social criticism, and essayists such as Lionel Stevenson in “Dickens’s Dark Novels” (1943) demonstrated how the later fiction presents a penetrating critique of Victorian society. Dorothy Van Ghent follows a similar line of reasoning in “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s” (1950). Her groundbreaking analysis shows how the symbolic qualities of Dickens’s style, particularly his use of reification, repetition, and metonymy, reflect his deepening concerns about “a world undergoing a gruesome spiritual transformation” (419). Especially in the later novels, she says, Dickens employs figurative language and various tropes to emphasize that “human separatedness” is the ordinary condition of life. In an oft-reprinted 1953 essay on Little Dorrit, the influential critic Lionel Trilling points out how the prison in this novel serves as a metaphor for the individual in society and encourages symbolic readings of Dickens’s fiction. Biographies of the period, especially Una Pope-Hennessy’s Charles Dickens (1945) and Edgar Johnson’s more detailed two-volume Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1952), stress the psychological traumas that shaped Dickens’s character and motivated his fiction, which Johnson characterizes as a continuing “critical analysis of modern society and its problems” (viii).

At the same time that arguments about Dickens’s social criticism were prevalent, a new approach was developing that attempted to treat his work independent of its social content. Foremost among its exponents was J. Hillis Miller, a future leader of the American deconstructionist movement, who argues in Charles Dickens: The World of His Novels (1958) that the novels should be read not as social criticism but as the vehicles through which Dickens inscribed a vision of the complex urban reality he encountered in Victorian London. The “world” of the novels is a self-contained universe parallel to, but not identical with, the real world from which Dickens extracted the content of his tales in order to impose a new moral and artistic ordering upon them.

The controversy over the proper way to read Dickens’s social commentary continued into the 1960s, as major studies appeared supporting both the “light” and “dark” views. Most influential among supporters of the former position was Steven Marcus, who argues in Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1965) that during the first half of his career Dickens created powerful works that offer “a more balanced representation of society” (225) than the later works. Robert Garis’s The Dickens Theatre (1965) is a more tendentious attack on the proponents of the dark Dickens. Garis claims that critical principles held in high esteem during the first half of the century, specifically moralist and formalist notions of disinterestedness and “the sympathetic imagination” (37), skewed judgments in favor of abstruse readings that do great injustice to Dickens. Emphasizing the theatricality of the novels, Garis claims Dickens often uses techniques from the stage in his fiction. His works are not meant to provide deep insight into character, nor are they appropriately judged by formalist standards, which demand unity of plot and theme. Instead his skills as a humorist and caricaturist make his works memorable and brilliant and demonstrate his comic genius.

The portrait of Dickens as an alienated artist was most prevalent during this time among psychoanalytical and formalist critics, who discovered a strong symbolic substratum in much of Dickens’s work. Mark Spilka’s articles and his discussion in Dickens and Kafka: A Mutual Interpretation (1963) argue that Dickens’s grotesque comedy serves the author as a way to deal with the dehumanizing society in which he lived. Taylor Stoehr’s Freudian reading of the novels in Dickens: The Dreamer’s Stance (1965) privileges the later novels. The recurrent patterns of revenge and retribution coupled with the accumulation of detail, the use of literary techniques such as metonymy and alliteration, and the heavy reliance on coincidence, make these novels function in much the same way as Freud describes dreams operating in the human unconscious. Many critical studies at this time stressed the symbolic qualities of Dickens’s fiction. Grahame Smith’s conclusion in Dickens, Money, and Society (1968) sums up this approach quite well: Dickens’s later novels, he writes, “are symbolic, transmutations of Victorian life” in which “character, setting, and action are consistently imbued with symbolic meaning” (206).

Dickens in an Age of Theory

By 1970, the centenary of Dickens’s death, his reputation had reached a new high point. In that year the total number of scholarly journals devoted to the study of Dickens and his work rose to four as Dickens Studies Annual and Dickens Studies Newsletter (later retitled Dickens Quarterly) began publication, joining The Dickensian (founded 1903) and Dickens Studies (founded 1965). A dozen books and special issues of scholarly periodicals devoted exclusively to his works were published in that year alone. Nevertheless, critical practice was changing, and revaluations of Dickens’s work soon revealed aspects of his fiction that had either been ignored or not noticed by generations entrenched in humanist or formalist critical approaches. Beginning in this decade, deconstructionists, feminists, new historicists, neo-Marxists, Lacanians, Foucauldians, neo-Freudians, and proponents of interdisciplinary cultural studies all took up Dickens’s works and in the process reshaped critical opinion about his fiction both as art and as social commentary.

Of course, analyses using methodologies that were coming to be known as “traditional” (that is, humanist, moral, or formalist) continued to appear. Barbara Hardy’s The Moral Art of Dickens (1970) is an extended assessment stressing the “moral concern” of his novels (xi). F. R. Leavis and his wife, Q. D. Leavis, offer an extensive defense of Dickens as a moral artist in Dickens the Novelist (1970), curiously reversing F. R. Leavis’s earlier judgment that Dickens, despite his exceptional talent, was too much of an iconoclast and lacked the sustained seriousness of purpose to rank among the great English authors. One need only to scan Fred Kaplan’s Dickens and Mesmerism (1975), an examination of Dickens’s fascination with this subject that combines biographical analysis and close textual readings, or Robert Patten’s Charles Dickens and His Publishers (1978) to see that works based on time-honored forms of scholarly inquiry were still being published. Two important new biographical studies, Kaplan’s Dickens: A Biography (1988) and Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1990), also appeared during these years of critical revaluation. Valerie Gager’s Shakespeare and Dickens: The Dynamics of Influence (1996) is illustrative of critical studies that are sensitive to new, poststructuralist interpretations of Dickens but employ traditional methodologies—in this case, comparative analysis and influence study—to illustrate how Dickens’s art was shaped by his understanding of an earlier writer.

Still, despite the continuance of these traditional methodologies, a definite shift toward newer ones can be seen beginning in the early 1970s with the publication of two works, both on the same topic. John Carey’s The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (1973) first refutes earlier psychological and social critiques of Dickens’s work before launching into an extended analysis of the novelist’s symbolic use of imagery to reveal some essential qualities of the human character. In contrast, Garrett Stewart’s Dickens and the Trials of Imagination (1974), which explores the way in which Dickens deals with the topic of imagination, employs a highly metaphoric and self-conscious method of analysis that applies theories of narratology to close readings of individual novels. While Carey’s work received polite if reserved praise, Stewart’s polarized the community of Dickens scholars who seemed unsure of how to respond to this new way of viewing fiction.

A sampling of studies suggests the extent to which these new approaches, characterized by extensive references to a host of theorists of language, literature, psychology, and society, now serve as the foundation for analysis of the novelist’s canon. Dickens is of great interest to Robert Higbie in Character and Structure in the English Novel (1984), a study influenced by Vladimir Propp, Northrop Frye, Tzvetan Todorov, and A. J. Greimas, in which Higbie defends Dickens against charges that his characters lack complexity. In Dickens and the Broken Scripture (1985) Janet Larson applies the theories of Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin to reassess Dickens’s use of biblical imagery. The social theories of Michel Foucault shape the argument of D. A. Miller in The Novel and the Police (1988), in which he demonstrates how Dickens seeks through his fiction to impose social discipline on his readers just as he sought to impose discipline on his own life. Natalie McKnight blends Foucault’s sociological theories with contemporary feminist approaches to fiction in Idiots, Madmen, and Other Prisoners in Dickens (1993), a work that presents Dickens as a kind of precursor to Foucault in recognizing how society isolates and attempts to reshape social outliers. Jeremy Tambling’s Dickens, Violence, and the Modern State (1995) goes even further in combining Foucauldian social criticism with theories of European theorists such as Julia Kristeva, George Bataille, and Walter Benjamin in demonstrating how Dickens’s later novels are a kind of crusade “against the forces of modernity which organize social and private life” (7).

Perhaps no aspect of Dickens’s fiction underwent more serious scrutiny or prompted greater debate among critics during the last three decades of the twentieth century than his portrayal of women. Here again, judgments are mixed. Richard Barickman argues in Corrupt Relations (1982) that Dickens’s fiction is a “complex, persistent, and radical critique of the Victorian system of sexual relationships” (vii). Michael Slater’s Dickens and Women (1983) explains how the novelist’s relationship with the real women in his life influenced his fiction. He concludes that Dickens was somewhat uneasy about the power women possessed and that his portraits of women reveal his apprehensions about their potential to cause harm to men and to society at large.

Avowed feminists were not quite as gentle as Slater. The feminist revisionist reading of the Dickens canon can be said to have begun with Kate Millett’s brief comments about him in Sexual Politics (1970). Here, she writes that even a “nearly perfect indictment of both patriarchy and capitalism” (89) such as Dombey and Son is marred by Dickens’s lifelong penchant to present even his most serious women as “insipid goodies” (90). Writing a few years later, Françoise Basch asserts in Relative Creatures (1974) that Dickens cannot portray women realistically. In her influential study Uneven Developments (1988), Mary Poovey argues that Dickens’s portraits of women reveal his willingness to fulfill the role expected of him as a male novelist in Victorian England. In “’Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend” (1989), Helena Michie explains how Dickens’s heroines, “remarkable for their insubstantiality,” become realized for readers only “through illness, scarring, and deformity” (199).

Near the close of the century, however, later feminist critics began to challenge earlier readings that had been highly critical of Dickens’s portrayal of women. Notable among them is Sandra Hopkins, who argues in “’Wooman, Lovely Wooman’: Four Dickens Heroines and the Critics” (1990) that early feminists often employed double standards in critiquing Dickens and his female contemporaries. Similarly, Alison Milbank suggests in Daughters of the House (1992) that feminists have misunderstood and misinterpreted Dickens. What feminists do not want to acknowledge, she writes, is that Dickens understood that both women and men could be cut off from the sources of power and marginalized in society. Brenda Ayres’s eloquent defense of Dickens in Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels (1998) also challenges earlier feminist readings of his work, claiming that Dickens actually wrote against the dominant ideology of his day to produce work that is in fact subversive, a quality admired by feminists in women writers.

Two other intriguing groups of reinterpretations that appeared during the last decades of the century are those by Marxists and New Historicists. Earlier Marxists such as Raymond Williams were generally positive in their assessments of Dickens, finding that his method of dramatizing modern urban life “relates very precisely to his historical period” (The English Novel 40). However, later ones tend to follow the lead of Terry Eagleton, who insists in Criticism and Ideology (1976) that Dickens was too tied to bourgeois ideology to write truly revolutionary critiques. Hence, important Marxist works such as Steven Connor’s Charles Dickens (1985) stress the internal disconnectedness of Dickens’s novels, finding the author unable to provide closure to his novels because by doing so he would have endorsed the dominant capitalist ideology of his day, an ideology with which he was discernibly uncomfortable.

Postcolonial critics have been concerned with Dickens’s attitudes toward another dominant ideology of Victorian England, imperialism. Among many such studies, Wendy S. Jacobson’s collection Dickens and the Children of Empire (2000) provides a representative sampling of modern critical judgments of Dickens’s support of Britain’s colonial empire. Contributors to Jacobson’s volume who are themselves from former British colonies generally find Dickens a man of his time who did not possess a universal humanitarian outlook, as many critics of earlier generations had suggested.

Evidence of Enduring Reputation

There is no doubt that Dickens will continue to attract critical attention at least for the foreseeable future. Since 2000, a number of important studies have appeared, some employing new theoretical approaches, others using more traditional methods of literary analysis. Some retrace old ground to offer new readings, such as John Bowen’s Other Dickens: “Pickwick” to “Chuzzlewit” (2000), a reprise of Steven Marcus’s 1965 study of the early novels that uses poststructuralist theory to celebrate the ambiguity and open-endedness of the early fiction. David Parker’s The Doughty Street Novels (2002) also focuses on the earlier novels and seeks to explain how events in Dickens’s life shaped this work. Several studies tackle Dickens’s interest in literary tradition; for example, both Julian Wolfreys’s “’I Wants to Make Your Flesh Creep’: Notes Toward a Reading of the Comic-Gothic in Dickens” (2001) and Peter K. Garrett’s chapter on Dickens in Gothic Reflections (2003) go beyond cataloging gothic elements in the novels to explain how this tradition shaped Dickens’s narratives.

There has also been a renewed interest in Dickens’s nonfiction. For decades the study of Dickens’s journalism had interested a small group of scholars, but few extended discussions had been published. As cultural studies prompted an expanded interest in the entire Dickens canon, this lacuna began to be filled. John M. L. Drew’s Dickens the Journalist (2003) is perhaps the best work to date detailing Dickens’s career as a writer and editor for periodical publications. At the same time, Drew and David Paroissien, editor of the Dickens Quarterly, are spearheading a project to make the weekly magazines Dickens edited, Household Words and All the Year Round, accessible to scholars on the Internet.

Among the more innovative approaches to Dickens has been that of cultural studies specialists, who aim to examine Dickens as a kind of cultural phenomenon. Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace (2003) is one such study. Here, Clayton uses Dickens’s career and his continuing reputation as a vehicle for explaining relationships between the Victorians and their twenty-first-century descendants. In a similar vein, Grahame Smith offers provocative commentary on the relationship between Dickens and twentieth-century filmmakers in Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (2003).

Each year in the past decade has been marked by the publication of a handful of new books on Dickens that point out how much can yet be discovered when new theoretical principles are applied to careful textual analysis. For example, Lynn Cain’s Dickens, Family, Authorship (2008) reminds scholars that psychoanalytical approaches to the study of the novelist and his work can still yield fruitful insights into the fiction. Chris Loutitt’s Dickens’s Secular Gospel (2009) challenges received opinion that Dickens was in accord with his contemporaries in his views on the subject of work. The essayists contributing to Eileen Gilooly and Deirdre David’s Contemporary Dickens (2009), among them some of the most important Victorian scholars of recent years, point out how much Dickens has to say to twenty-first-century readers on issues such as gender, sexuality, human relationships, the environment, and the creation of personal and national identity. And perhaps nowhere is the richness of Dickens’s achievements or the reasons for his continuing appeal explained with greater clarity than in Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens (2009), a biography that includes detailed commentary on the novels as well as sage observations on Dickens’s journalism and short fiction. The Dickens that emerges from the pages of these critical commentaries is likely to engage scholars for decades to come.

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