The 32nd Dickens Universe, held July 29-August 3 at UCSC, saw the conference’s biggest registration ever; in fact, the event was sold out, and those who tried to register late were turned away. A record 308 people, including 58 graduate students, 54 faculty members, and 30 undergraduate students, traveled to College Eight on the university’s campus to discuss Bleak House, Dickens’s ninth novel. This novel has been treated twice before at the Universe, in 2001 and before that in 1988.
After dinner in the College Eight dining hall and the conference’s popular “Post-Prandial Potations” served by graduate students outside the Porter College Dining Hall, transformed into a lecture forum for the week, attendees were welcomed, as they have been for 32 years, by Director John Jordan, who began by saying, “Thank you for not going to the Olympics.” Indeed, as the years go by, the week-long retreat on the redwood-canopied campus is more and more a welcome escape from the real world, even from such positive events as the Olympic Games. Jordan introduced Santa Cruz Vice Mayor Hilary Bryant, who welcomed the attendees to the City of Santa Cruz, admitting that although she is a Porter College alumnus and has lived in the city twenty years, she had only recently been made aware of the existence of the Dickens Universe and was thrilled to know about it. Jordan also introduced the Universe organizers for this year, Helena Michie of Rice University and Elsie Michie of Louisiana State University, and the Project office staff: Coordinator JoAnna Rottke and her assistants Marissa and Antje.
The Project acknowledged Dickens’s bicentenary this year by putting party hats on the picture of Dickens on the nametags; “We don’t really like it when people refer to us as a festival, because we are more serious. But we are festive,” Jordan said. Unlike other academic conferences, the Dickens Universe brings together a number of different constituencies: faculty, graduate students, high school teachers, community college instructors, and members of the general public of all ages. “Dickens is special because he has this broad appeal,” Jordan said.
He then introduced Catherine Robson of New York University, whose lecture was titled, “What Esther Knows about Sex: Bleak House and Indifferent Parents.” Saying she was honored to give the first talk, Robson broke the group of attendees down in a different way, saying, “The strange constitution of the Dickens Universe,” from an academic presenter’s point of view, consists of “people who are familiar with Dickens and people who are not yet.” Or, she went on, there are those for whom Dickens is “the author of authors,” and those for whom he is just one author of many. And even within the faculty, there are those who specialize in Dickens and those who do not. Is there, she asked, a difference in the way in which any of these groups approach books? There is also a difference between academic discussions and “book club” discussions: for lay people, she said, characters in novels are often treated as real people. For academics, they are “constructs.” But this was not always so. In the early 1700s, readers supposed characters in novels, such as Robinson Crusoe, were real people. It was not until the mid 1700s that readers started to accept that characters were fictional “and respond to them as plausible inventions.” How do we then access the minds of consumers of literature over the past 200 years?” she asked.
It helps to look, again, at two types of people: diachronics, who see their selves as continuous over time; and episodics, who see the self that is in the present as different from the self that was here in the past. The achieved self of a diachronic can look back in time to tell a story because they understand the relationship of who they are now to who they were then. Examples in novels, she said, are Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and, of course, Bleak House. “Perhaps the strangest feature of this novel,” she said, is the “two incommensurate modes” in which the story is told—the omniscient narrator and Esther. There is no clear connection between the two. What, Robson asked, is their relationship to sex? “Sex is always in the Victorian novel,” she said, but how does it relate here? Esther the narrator does know about sex; she is telling the story seven years after her mother’s death, and she is a wife with two daughters. Thus in Chapter 51, when she turns away from Ada and Richard’s door without knocking, we can infer what the “murmur of young voices” was that she heard through the door. This inference can help us understand the “driving concern” of Bleak House, Robson said: Esther the character is cut off from lovers her own age; she views sex from a child’s position. Another way to understand the connection between the narratives is sex vs. production of children; the omniscient narrator is in a sense the “indifferent parent of the universe,” while Esther is “the child of the universe.” The two narratives cover, in different ways, bringing up children, regulating sexual relations, abandoning children, and abandoning desire.
After the lecture each evening throughout the week, the 2005 version of Bleak House, starring Gillian Anderson as Lady Dedlock, was screened in parts; the film also had afternoon showings for those who preferred bed or socializing after a full day.
On Monday morning, the general public and the undergraduate and high-school students were assigned to 8:30 a.m. faculty-led discussion groups while graduate students attended writing workshops and pedagogy workshops with faculty. Morning “context” discussion-group leaders this year included Iain Crawford of the University of Delaware, Michael Rectenwald of New York University, Vybarr Cregan-Reid of the University of Kent, Gerhard Joseph of the City University of New York, Margaret Loose of UC San Diego, Juliet John of Royal Holloway University, Holly Furneaux of the University of Leicester, Pariac Finnerty of the University of Portsmouth, and Kryuiaki Hadjiafxendi of the University of Exeter. This writer attended the group led by Juliet John and Holly Furneaux, which proved to be a fascinating week-long look into reforms in Chancery, “romantic friendship” between women, sanitary reform, and other issues that affected the writing of Dickens’s novels and others of the time.
On Monday morning, John Jordan introduced this year’s essay contest winners. The High School Essay Contest winners this year are Nathalie Kopp of Westerville, OH, and Abigail Wilkinson of Herndon, VA. Their teachers are Michelle Fuchs and Steven Wilkinson, respectively (Abigail is home-schooled). Jon Varese coordinates the essay contest; Anne Bay and Rivka Yerushalmi sponsor two scholarships that cover Universe expenses for the students and their teachers. The California Community College Essay Contest Scholarship winner this year is Rachel Kelly of Mira Costa Community College in Oceanside. Tom Savignano is the sponsor of the community college scholarship, which covers Universe expenses for the student.
Allen MacDuffie of the University of Texas at Austin presented Monday morning’s lecture, called “Dickens’s Energy Crisis: Bleak House.” “Energy,” he said, is a “unique quality of Dickens’s fiction”; it encompasses his schedule, his imagination, his subjects, his language, and his characters. In addition, inanimate objects in Dickens often also have their own energy. Using the buzzwords of today, MacDuffie broke his talk into three parts: Energy resources in Bleak House, sustainability, and broader historical questions, looking at Bleak House as “one of the most ecological texts of the 19th century.” The terminology has a connection, he said, because at the time Bleak House was written, “people were just discovering that chemical reactions were combinations of energy; these terms were just coming into being.” A particular interest of the Victorians, he said, was converting energy from one form to another. Tulkinghorn is a good example of this; he transfers himself from country to city “Star Trek–style.” In addition, transformations of energy take place as sheep are converted into parchment, goats into wigs, and pasture into chaff, as Dickens writes in Chapter 42. Mr. Turveydrop is converted into a model of deportment by the energy of his family; Mr. Chadband is converted into an oil-producing engine by other people’s food. Gridley, on the other hand, suffers from energy exhaustion; Snagsby tries unsuccessfully to transform Jo with half-crowns. Energy can be likened to capital, MacDuffie said, but in Dickens, energy is all put into “costs,” and thus used up. In the second part of his talk, MacDuffie argued that the ecological and the psychological are intertwined. To the Victorian, “sustainability” meant the ability of an argument to withstand scrutiny; the term belonged to the legal world. But Bleak House “resides at the juncture” of the Victorian and the current meaning. Richard and Skimpole present “unsustainable arguments” when talking about money; but for characters like Carstone and Gridley, both monetary resources and bodily resources are unsustainable; they “spiral into debt and optimism simultaneously,” MacDuffie said. In the third section, MacDuffie pointed out “Natural resources are part of the Victorian story.” There was no fear about “sustainability” as there is today; people relied on God’s will. There was no notion that consumption would result in loss of resources; conversely, there was an idea that if coal and timber did give out, someone would find another resource to take their places. Thus the Victorians not only recognized repetitive destructive practices, they came to depend on them. In Dickens’s fiction, “Those who work honestly do find faith in Providence and its sustenance. This,” MacDuffie said, “is one of the energies of his fiction.”
After the morning lectures, non-academic participants were again separated into discussion groups led by teams of two graduate students to discuss the text itself. This seminar format provides eighteen graduate students with a week of classroom experience and gives Universe attendees a chance to explore the text more carefully, looking more closely at the handling of topics and issues discussed in the earlier morning groups.
After lunch in the College Eight Dining hall, participants dispersed to undergraduate seminars, a high school teachers’ workshop, faculty-led graduate student seminars, a 19th-century seminar, a Dickensian seminar, a Life Writing Working Group, and the re-showing of the film. At 3:00, Victorian Tea was served on the College Eight Lawn. The teas include cold tea punch with ginger, fresh strawberries dipped in powdered sugar, Barbara Keller’s homemade tea cookies, and hot Earl Grey tea poured from a silver tea service with milk, sugar, and lemon; all of this is served in crystal and china rather than the usual conference-service paper and plastic, creating an enjoyable afternoon diversion. This year was no exception. The Friends of the Dickens Project supports this event, among others, and membership and volunteer opportunities are made available during the teas.
After the teas, there were afternoon talks, including Ryan Fong of Kalamazoo College, speaking on Monday about “Uncommercial Travels in Dullborough Town, or, My Search for Dickens World and Dickens’s World.” Tuesday was left free for people to go into town or take walks throughout the wooded campus. On Wednesday afternoon, Stanford Emeritus Professor Rob Polhemus spoke on “Fiction, Painting, and Allegorical Scoops: How Charles Dickens and Francisco Goya Illuminate One Another and Why It Matters.” Thursday afternoon’s presentation was a dramatic reading by UC Riverside Emeritus Professor Ed Eigner titled, “A Bleak House Fantasia,” and on Friday, Barbara Keller, creator and chair of the Friends of the Dickens Project’s afternoon tea committee, presented the year’s Herb Furse Memorial Lecture, an exploration of both the history and the traditions of tea drinking, called “The Full Measure of Tea.”
On Monday evening, Friends of the Dickens Project President Dan Atwell conducted the first of the week’s Silent Auctions during the Post-Prandial Potations. Proceeds from the auctions, which always draw a number of bids, support the Friends of the Dickens Project. Auctioned items include everything from Dickens figurines to British-themed tea towels and tea cups to antiquarian books to collectible prints and woodcuts of Dickens’s characters. After the announcement of the auction winners, John Jordan, Jonathan Grossman of UCLA, and Helena Michie of Rice University took part in a book panel. The book under discussion was John Jordan’s Supposing “Bleak House”, released last year. This, organizer Elsie Michie said in her introduction, is the Universe’s first-ever book panel. At the Joyce conference, she said, they are called “living book reviews.” She also mentioned that the Universe was currently being covered on Twitter (#DU12); the man sitting in front of this writer immediately turned on his phone.
Helena Michie opened the panel discussion about Jordan’s book by saying that Jordan’s 2001 Universe talk on Bleak House, title “Reading Esther,” in which he said that “Dickens’s control of narrative voice deserves a lifetime of study,” changed the thread of academic thought about the novel. Jonathan Grossman, adopting his usual energetic, motion-laden style of talking, asked the audience to stand in as “students” and asked for comments from them about Esther as an “obstacle” to teaching Bleak House. Michie had to say, “Jon, I think class is over,” to bring the book panel back to its purpose, and she pointed out a potential problem with Jordan’s book: his interest is not in the story; it’s in a person who is not in the text. Going back to the idea of characters as constructs rather than real people, Michie accused Jordan of allowing Esther to “explode out of her parent book” and become more of a real person. “She gets under my skin,” Michie admitted. Jordan responded by saying that “To me, Esther is a ghost.” He does admire Esther as a narrator, but he feels that her birth is the moment of trauma, making her unable to “get in touch with the strength of her character.” Esther imagines (and so her mother is told) that she dies at birth. “Her fantasy is that she’s dead,” Jordan said, “but she must pretend to go on living.” Jordan is disappointed with the end of the novel, though: he believes that Esther returns to her “simpering voice” after she becomes the doctor’s wife. She loses her strength of character and reverts to her dream voice. She has become, Jordan said, “The ghost that walks at Chesney Wold.”
On Tuesday morning, Rae Greiner of Indiana University presented “Bleak House: Pastoral.” She related listening to an NPR story about the Marlboro Music Festival in southern Vermont, in which as participant said of the festival, “This is real life; everything else is just a nightmare.” This, she said, was how she felt about the Dickens Universe, echoing John Jordan’s comment about the Olympics on Sunday evening. We do not normally think of Dickens as writing “pastoral” novels, Greiner said, but compared to novelists like Forster and James, who had “no stupid people” in their novels, Dickens presents characters with “limited lives” presented as full. This kind of life, she said, “needs to be counted as an element of the pastoral.” In addition, Dickensian coincidence follows the pastoral formula: everyone is in the same boat, according to Greiner. The country and the city, too, are “more similar than opposed” in Bleak House. Professor Dingo, for example, represents nature, and the Chancellor, the guardian of infants and idiots, has a double who is untended and unkempt. Also touching on the pastoral is the fact that Esther “lives in perpetual summer.” Greiner also touched on the narrative question, saying, “We are introduced to characters twice,” which gives us two ways of seeing a world.
Tuesday evening saw somewhat of a departure from the usual Universe events. What Project Coordinator JoAnna Rottke called a “Fancy Schmancy Dinner” on the schedule was served at long linen-covered tables in Porter Dining Hall, preceding a presentation by actress Miriam Margolyes of her one-woman show “Dickens’s Women,” which she developed in 1989. Margolyes’s appearance was sponsored by the Friends of the Dickens Project. The dinner, featuring salmon, chicken, roast vegetables, salad, rolls, wine, and strawberry shortcake, was a great success despite some organizational problems, but the focus of the evening was Margolyes’ performance, which she introduced as her portrayal of a number of characters from the novels, including Mrs. Skewton, Sairey Gamp, and Mrs. Pipchin, interspersed with her own biographical narrative. As always, Margolyes was received appreciatively by the group.
On Wednesday morning, a substitution was made because Ian Duncan, scheduled to give a talk called “A Vast Glass, Vibrating: Dickens’s Human Forms,” was not able to attend. Instead, Rutgers University Emeritus Professor George Levine lectured on “Bleak House and Money: The Not So Dirty Not So Little Secret.” Levine started by saying, “Whatever else the lawsuit is about, it’s about money.” Victorians had problems with money, he continued. “It is as secret and crucial as sex.” It never, he said, appears as a “neutral object of exchange” for the Victorians; there are always complications and secrecy associated with it, even though the work ethic—a means of getting money—was strong. Yet we never know how John Jarndyce comes by his money. “There are secrets on nearly every page of Bleak House,” Levine said, from the Dedlocks to the Bagnets’ secret, making the book a “series of mysteries” and disguises. Yet, Levine concluded, not talking about money in the novel seems to be a way to keep it clean.
On Wednesday evening, John Glavin of Georgetown University took attendees on a journey through the land of possibility in his talk, “English Happiness, Or, An Impossible Conversation.” In it, he asked, “What happens next?” A physician’s wife in the second half of the 19th century was, most likely, always alone—the doctor was always away. Thus is Esther, like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, in the novel published three years later, subject to collapse and unspeakable agony? “Bleak House has many endings,” Glavin said. “But not all of them or the best of them are in Bleak House.” He then asked the audience to treat Bleak House as a palimpsest, and to “wash over” the original pages of the book Dickens published. “We need to co-write it,” he said. The rewriting will not be textual or historical; it will be “knowledge we make for ourselves.” For Glavin, this knowledge took the form of a train trip through Russia in the 1870s, during which one traveler, “Anna K,” wishes for English happiness. When she asks for it from a veiled fellow traveler, “Lady D,” refuses to give it up because Anna won’t also take her unhappiness. Glavin suggested that his audience “Examine each text in relation to all other texts.” Doing so, can, he argued, “change our vantage point” for any given novel.
On Thursday morning, John Bowen of the University of York started his lecture by reminding the attendees that the university no longer gives any money to the Dickens Project; it is dependent solely on donations for support. He was only one of many speakers to thank the Friends for supporting his presence and his lecture. He also took issue with John Glavin’s inference that being married to a Welshman who goes to live in Yorkshire would be “boring,” pointing out that he is, in fact, a Welshman living in Yorkshire. Bowen’s lecture, “The Passages of Bleak House,” is about passages (text) about passages (means to get somewhere) and passages about passages (transitions) as well as passages (crossings). All meanings, he said, are vital to Bleak House. The house itself has irregular passages, characters pass into love, life passes by, and time passes by “with simultaneous slowness and speed,” Bowen said. The woman who consoles Jenny passes from ugly to beautiful as she speaks; similarly, Lady Dedlock changes when she sees Hawdon’s handwriting. Chancery reduces everything to passing; the Ghost’s Walk is defined by the passing of footsteps. Esther passes through illness, Jo sweeps the “passage” in front of the graveyard. On the other hand, there are things that cannot pass: a “deadlock” is a complete stop, for example. And Bowen also returned to the question of Esther’s narrative, pointing out that Esther says, “I proceed to other passages of my narrative.” He does not have a “passing theory” about this; are these only passages from a larger narrative? And, Esther “breaks off in midpassage” at the end, as she “passes on—and away.”
On Thursday evening, Tricia Lootens of the University of Georgia and Jason Rudy of the University of Maryland spoke on “Dickens’s Poetry/Poetry’s Dickens.” This year, they said, is also the bicentenary of Robert Browning. They opened with a discussion of poetry and “spasmody,” or what actually was perceived as constituting “good” poetry in the 1850s. Spasmodic poetry came into being at the same time Bleak House was being serialized; Tennyson’s “Maud” was perceived to be spasmodic. At the same time, critics of “first person expression” became fashionable, and the “slavery question” raised its head. These things, they said, affected both poetry and novels. Dickens published poetry in his magazine Household Words; he was a critic, but he didn’t despise all poetry, or even all sentimental poetry. And, they argued, much of Dickens’s prose can serve as “found poetry”:
The amiable face
With which he said it
I think
I shall never forget.
And aren’t the “murders” of Richard and Jo metaphoric? Elizabeth Barrett Browning called Dickens a poet, as did others.
After the Thursday evening lecture, everyone was invited to the Grand Party, hosted by the Friends of the Dickens Project. This yearly event features desserts, cheese, and wines served by Friends volunteers and is yet another opportunity for faculty, graduate students, high school students, and members of the general public to get together and discuss lectures, chapters, and perceptions about the novel and Dickens in general.
On Friday morning, a “Faculty Roundtable” made up of many of the week’s presenters, John Bowen, Catherine Robson, George Levine, Jason Rudy, Tricia Lootens, Jim Buzard, John Jordan, and Allen MacDuffie, attempted to fill in some of the holes left (or created) by the discussions during the week. Jim Buzard started out by reading from Evelyn Waugh’s famous last chapter of A Handful of Dust (published in its own right as a short story titled “The Man Who Liked Dickens”). Then he asked the audience, “What have you felt was not sufficiently part of our conversation?” Some of the answers included “addiction,” “Miss Flite,” and “birds.” But the panel did not confine themselves to these. John Jordan pointed out that the passage immediately following “Nemo’s” burial could also serve as “found poetry.” George Levine stated that Ada does not really come into the book as a character. “There’s nowhere in the book where she is,” he said. And John Jordan added that the Dedlock family’s ghost is reminiscent of the recurring “King Charles’s head” in David Copperfield—“The ghost is revolutionary,” he said.
As it has for the past several years, the Dickens Universe ended this year with a full-blown auction by the Friends of the Dickens Project, a Victorian dance with the Brassworks Band and Stanford-based dance instructor Alan Winston, complete with refreshments and desserts. The books selected for next year’s Dickens Universe, scheduled for July 28-August 3, 2013, are The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. Watch the Dickens Universe web site (http://dickens.ucsc.edu) for registration information; register as early as January to assure a seat for this popular conference.
