Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: Towards a pedagogy of Bibliography
- Part I Rationales
- Part II Creating and Using Resources
- Part III Methodologies
- Teaching ‘History of the Book’
- Preparing library school graduate students for Rare Book and Special Collections jobs: Assignments and Exercised that Work
- Book History and Library Education in the Twenty-first Century
- Making the Medicine Go Down: Baggy Monsters and Book History
- ‘They are Not Just Big, Dusty Novels’: Teaching Hard Times within the Context of Household Words
- ‘In a Bibleistic Way’: Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry Through Book and Periodical Studies
- Teaching Bibliography and Research Methods
- Teaching Textual Criticism
- Part V Resources
- Index
‘They are Not Just Big, Dusty Novels’: Teaching Hard Times within the Context of Household Words
from Teaching ‘History of the Book’
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction: Towards a pedagogy of Bibliography
- Part I Rationales
- Part II Creating and Using Resources
- Part III Methodologies
- Teaching ‘History of the Book’
- Preparing library school graduate students for Rare Book and Special Collections jobs: Assignments and Exercised that Work
- Book History and Library Education in the Twenty-first Century
- Making the Medicine Go Down: Baggy Monsters and Book History
- ‘They are Not Just Big, Dusty Novels’: Teaching Hard Times within the Context of Household Words
- ‘In a Bibleistic Way’: Teaching Nineteenth-Century American Poetry Through Book and Periodical Studies
- Teaching Bibliography and Research Methods
- Teaching Textual Criticism
- Part V Resources
- Index
Summary
Teaching charles Dickens's Hard Times within its original publication context in Household Words (serialized from 1 April to 12 August 1854) helps students think about the novel in more complex ways. It allows them to understand the Victorian literary marketplace and to engage in higher-level reading practices by analyzing the periodical form's ‘seemingly radical incoherence’ that ‘coexists with order’. This periodicals-centered approach also provides students with a richer sense of literature's ability to intervene in social and political debates. in particular, considering the periodical context of Hard Times helps students arrive at more satisfying answers to critical questions such as those posed by the call to reform at the novel's end.
At the conclusion of Hard Times, Charles Dickens entreats his readers to recognize and act on their power to change society: ‘Dear Reader!’ Dickens exclaims, ‘it rests with you and me, whether … similar things shall be or not’. This appeal to action has troubled readers at least since George Gissing claimed that the novel was too exaggerated to be an effective protest against industrialism. In fact, on the basis of this entreaty, Nicholas Coles argues that
[d]espite [Dickens's] appearing to assume by his appeal that his novel has shown us what form our activism should take, Hard Times is the Dickens novel which readers have least known what to do with, and about which there has been least agreement… Dickens presents a vision of society on the basis of which socially redeeming action, including his own reforming practice, is effectually impossible.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History , pp. 95 - 101Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014