DICKENS STUDIES ANNUAL
Essays on Victorian Fiction

Volume 50, No. 1 (2019)
Published by Penn State University Press

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Great Expectations and the Evolution of Women
Rose Patricia O'Malley, Baruch College, City University of New York

Seen through an evolutionary framework, Estella from Great Expectations's counter-intuitive romantic and reproductive decisions indicate Dickens's understanding of the space for individual female agency within a Darwinian environment. Critics have argued that her apparent lack of warmth and childless, violent first marriage signals the character's status of a biological failure, either due to her criminal birth parents or twisted upbringing by Miss Havisham, both of which can be understood in evolutionary terms. However, Estella's choice to pursue a path away from motherhood is not portrayed by Dickens as less "natural" or a problem to be diagnosed, but rather the deliberate actions of a figure with her own agenda, who must negotiate her biological drives as well as her own desires in pursuing her future. Dickens also explores other opportunities for feminine agency through the character of Biddy's educational labor and eventual marriage. His novel therefore portrays a more optimistic Darwinian environment, especially for women, than many of his contemporaries.

KEYWORDS
Great Expectations, evolution, Darwin, feminism, neo-materialism

Dickens's Anonymous Margins: Names, Network Theory, and the Serial Novel
Adam Grener and Isabel Parker, Victoria University of Wellington

This article argues that anonymous characters serve as an important role within Dickens's effort to render the networked nature of Victorian society. Building on recent scholarship that has turned to "networks" to examine Dickens's complex and evolving character systems, this article details the insights gleaned from an interdisciplinary research program that uses computational methods to map Dickens's character networks as they develop during a novel's serial production. In particular, it highlights the problems presented by characters who remain nameless: while these characters may seem insignificant or mere background to the action of a novel, they frequently inhabit functionally and structurally significant positions within character networks that aim to capture complex social relationships. Through detailed analysis of anonymous characters in Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House, this article argues that anonymity becomes one way in which Dickens's novels aim to reconcile particularized and structural perspectives on the social body. Although it is easy to fixate on Dickens's idiosyncratic practices of naming characters, though who remain nameless actually provide important insights into Dickens's navigation of serial form and the development of his representational practices from his earliest sketches through to his final novels.

KEYWORDS
Charles Dickens, anonymity, serial novel, social networks, digital humanities

The Dickensian George Eliot
George Levine, Rutgers University

Although critics have long insisted on the radical differences between the works of George Eliot and Dickens, and George Eliot (and her partner, G. H. Lewes) mounted a strong attack on Dickens's writing (with, of course, qualifications for his extravagant genius) in order to promote George Eliot's kind of fiction writing, there are important similarities between the two writers that are fundamental to the condition of writing novels in the Victorian era. Both write long multiplot fictions; both imagine individual lives as bound up in complex social webs; both achieve their "realism" by the way of extravagant, fairy-tale like manipulations of plot. Despite a critical tradition that tended to oppose them, admiration for one does not exclude admiration for the other.

KEYWORDS
multiplot novel, Dickensian, realism, connections, myth and fairy tale

The Emergence of Emergence: G. H. Lewes, Middlemarch, and Social Order
Daniel Edward Bivona, Arizona State University

The judgement that George Eliot's lover, G. H. Lewes, was the first to formulate and name the scientific concept of emergence is now widely accepted. When she edited the final volume of his last work, Problems of Life and Mind, which was published shortly after his death in 1877 and before hers in 1880, she both helped ensure a place in scientific history for Lewes as the first theorist of "emergence" in the nineteenth century, and provided the world with a philosophical introduction to the rich array of emergent themes that helped to make her novel Middlemarch one of the finest works of Victorian realism.

KEYWORDS
emergence, science, Lewes, George Eliot, Middlemarch

The Rise of Proto-Environmentalism in George Eliot
Sophie D. Christman, Stony Brook University

The "Ilfracombe" journals, "Ex Oriente Lux," and "A Minor Prophet" register the ways in which George Eliot's nineteenth-century nonfiction prose and poetry evidence ecotheological concerns that are proto-environmental, concerns that are also reflected in some of her novels. Employing an ecocritical methodology, this article traces the development of Eliot's ecological literacy, beginning with her scientific field observations that incubated what would become her lifelong literary aesthetic of moral sympathy put forth in "The Natural History of German Life." Eliot's initial moral sympathy advanced to an ecotheological perspective made visible in both Eliot's unpublished lyric poem "Ex Oriente Lux" and her canonic verse "A Minor Prophet." Eliot's early and mature writings countervailed the competing discourses of theology and science as they relate to the natural environment.

KEYWORDS
George Eliot, ecocriticism, "A Minor Prophet," Ilfracombe, "Ex Oriente Lux," Brownings, Victorian fiction

Life in Dead Things: Unreading Memorials in Thomas: Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Julia M. Clarke, Stony Brook University

Victorian literature contains many explorations of not just death as an event, but the particularity, idiosyncrasy, and meaning behind material acts of mourning. However, the significance and proliferation of characters in novels misreading or misinterpreting death objects has ben left largely unexplored. This articles looks at moments of misreading death objects–a repurposed marmalade jar filled with flowers, Tess's deceased father's epitaph, the D'Urberville tombs, Stonehenge–in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles in order to show intriguing vicissitudes of memorials and death objects. Though the Victorian reading public deems Tess morally repugnant, Hardy insists on calling her a "pure woman" in the novel's subtitle. A central project of Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles is to reveal the nuances of what it means to be a nineteenth-century woman on the cusp of the modern age: one who would theoretically expand options for women in terms of career, lifestyle, and sexuality. Moments of misreading death objects in Tess of the D'Urbervilles expose the central issue Hardy presents: declaring the humanity of a so-called fallen woman.

KEYWORDS
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, death, fallen women, unreading, thing theory, material culture

Recent Dickens Studies: 2017
Susan E. Cook, Southern New Hampshire University

This essay surveys Dickens scholarship and adaptations published in 2017, summarizing over two hundred books, chapters, articles, and other forms of media. Scholarship from 2017 featured a focus on biography and source studies; print culture including authors, readers, and publication practices; intermediality; language, form, and genre; science, religion, and philosophy; finance, economics, and class; geography, travel, and empire; gender and sexuality; animals and the environment; visual culture and museum culture; food; pedagogy and education; and editions, notes, and other resources. This review includes several web-based resources related to Dickens that may be of interest to scholars, as well as several adaptations.

KEYWORDS
Dickens, literary criticism, scholarship, Victorian, biography