Overview

This book examines Charles Dickens's fiction alongside publications emanating from Parliament. It argues that Dickens and Parliament were engaged in competitive efforts to represent the People at a crucial moment in the history of representative democracy--when the British government was under enormous political pressure to expand the franchise beyond a narrow band of male landowners. Contending that fiction and the literature of Parliament interacted at a host of levels--jostling one another in the same bookshops--it reads Dickens's novels in tandem with blue books, the practice texts of shorthand manuals, and Dickens's journalism. It shows how his fiction mocks parliamentary form (as in Pickwick Papers), canvasses the history of parliamentary representation (as in Bleak House), and depicts the relation of the People to the state as well as commerce (as in Little Dorrit). It thus rethinks the history of the Victorian novel by examining its rivalry with Parliament in the expanding world of print publication.

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9780192845405

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Reviews

An American academic, Dr Carolyn Vellenga Berman, has had the fascinating idea of looking at Charles Dickens' novels alongside the publications of a Parliament expanding its horizons ... is a classic of evocative and satirical reporting. * Lord Cormack, The House *

This fascinating study blends history and biography, analyzing Charles Dickens's work and his wish to improve society. * S. A. Parker, CHOICE * An American academic, Dr Carolyn Vellenga Berman, has had the fascinating idea of looking at Charles Dickens' novels alongside the publications of a Parliament expanding its horizons ... is a classic of evocative and satirical reporting. * Lord Cormack, The House * Important new book on Dickens. * John M. L. Drew, Dickens Quarterly * As Carolyn Vellenga Berman notes in the Coda to Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper, her focus is upon the ways in which 'Dickens's fiction illustrates how the national contours of an imagined community developed alongside both print-capitalism and attempts to define the People implicit in a representative form of government' (321). Emphasising Dickens's nature as 'an embedded writer' (133), profoundly immersed in and engaged with the institutions about which he wrote, Berman explores how his early experiences as a Parliamentary reporter laid a foundation for his fiction and the multiple ways in which it evolved an ongoing and 'complex interrogation' (3) of a rivalry to represent the People that developed between the claims of the legislature and the rapidly rising genre of the novel. * Iain Crawford, The Dickensian *

This fascinating study blends history and biography, analyzing Charles Dickens's work and his wish to improve society. * S. A. Parker, CHOICE * An American academic, Dr Carolyn Vellenga Berman, has had the fascinating idea of looking at Charles Dickens' novels alongside the publications of a Parliament expanding its horizons ... is a classic of evocative and satirical reporting. * Lord Cormack, The House *

Author Information

Carolyn Vellenga Berman (Ph.D., Brown University) is an Associate Professor of literature and Co-Chair of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School, in New York City. She is the author of Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery (Cornell University Press). Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Novel, Genre, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts and collections ranging from Just Below South (University of Virginia) to The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (Blackwell). She serves on the advisory board of the North American Victorian Studies Association and the editorial board of Dickens Studies Annual.

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