Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorian novel and its readers
- 2 The business of Victorian publishing
- 3 A history of criticism of the Victorian novel
- 4 Victorian realism
- 5 Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel
- 6 Race and the Victorian novel
- 7 Social class and the Victorian novel
- 8 When gender meets sexuality in the Victorian novel
- 9 Victorian feelings
- 10 Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel
- 11 The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
11 - The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on contributors
- Chronology
- Introduction
- 1 The Victorian novel and its readers
- 2 The business of Victorian publishing
- 3 A history of criticism of the Victorian novel
- 4 Victorian realism
- 5 Intellectual debate in the Victorian novel
- 6 Race and the Victorian novel
- 7 Social class and the Victorian novel
- 8 When gender meets sexuality in the Victorian novel
- 9 Victorian feelings
- 10 Sensation and the fantastic in the Victorian novel
- 11 The transatlantic novel in the nineteenth century
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- References
Summary
News of Charles Dickens’s sudden death on June 9, 1870, reached Bret Harte several weeks after the event while the American writer was staying in San Rafael, California. He immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back for twenty-four hours the forthcoming publication of his Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine. “[I]n two or three hours” he composed “Dickens in Camp,” an elegy to the dead author which recalls or imagines (probably a bit of both) a group of tough gold miners at the California diggings in the mid nineteenth century, spellbound by a reading of Dickens’s novel The Old Curiosity Shop:
Till one arose, and from his pack’s scant treasure
A hoarded volume drew,
And cards were dropped from hands of listless leisure
To hear the tale anew;
[…]
The fir-trees, gathering closer in the shadows,
Listened in every spray,
While the whole camp, with “Nell” on English meadows,
Wandered and lost their way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel , pp. 231 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012