Awful Unknown Quantities”
Addressing the Readers in Hard Times
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12411237 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carolyn Vellenga Berman (New School, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 561-582 |
| Publication date | 2009-06-12 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victorian Literature and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1060-1503 • E-ISSN: 1470-1553 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1060150309090342 |
| OpenAlex | W2122125395 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz” has done more, we verily believe, for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . . Boz, and men like Boz, are the true humanizers, and therefore the true pacificators, of the world. They sweep away the prejusdices of class and caste, and disclose the common ground of humanity which lies beneath factitious social and national systems. Such tributes to his political powers must have been gratifying to a writer who had begun his career as a parliamentary reporter. They proclaimed the power of the writer in an age of print, bearing out Thomas Carlyle's sense that “Printing . . . is equivalent to Democracy . . . . Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making.” Fraser's elaborated on this idea by linking Dickens's uncanny ability to “introduce” characters to one another to his ability to “introduce” such characters to readers of different ranks. “Men like Boz,” the reviewer explained, “introduce the peasantry to the peerage” and “the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (700)
Art · Class (philosophy · Democracy · Glory · Goodwill · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Short Stories in Global Literature
Culture and Society, 1780-1950
The Body Economic
Novel and The Police
Discipline and Punish
Knowing the Past
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes
Uneven Developments
The Order of Things
Monsters of Metonymy
Characterizing the Factory System
Blue Books and the Victorian Reader
States of Inquiry
The School Inspector
Discipline and Punish
A History of the Modern Fact
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |