Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:54:01.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Possible Persons: Dickensian Character, Violent Play

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2022

Vanessa Smith
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens's “little” characters in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend, referencing Melanie Klein's “play-technique.” Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens's increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toylike figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.

Type
Essays
Information
PMLA , Volume 137 , Issue 2 , March 2022 , pp. 215 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Alexander, Christine, editor. The Glass Town Saga, 1826–1832. Basil Blackwell, 1987. Vol. 1 of The Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë.Google Scholar
Amigoni, David. Victorian Literature. Edinburgh UP, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bennet, Rachel. “Punch versus Christian in The Old Curiosity Shop.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 22, no. 88, Nov. 1971, pp. 423–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bodenheimer, Rosemary. “Dickens and the Knowing Child.” Dickens and the Imagined Child, edited by Peter Merchant and Catherine Waters, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 13–26.Google Scholar
Byler, Lauren. “Dickens's Little Women; or, Cute as the Dickens.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, 2013, pp. 219–50.Google Scholar
Chesterton, G. K. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. E. P. Dutton, 1921.Google Scholar
“Coram, N.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/41401?redirectedFrom=coram#eid.Google Scholar
Crone, Rosalind. Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London. Manchester UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Penguin, 1985.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. David Copperfield. Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Penguin, 1996.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. Oxford UP, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Letter to Mary Tyler. 6 Nov. 1849. The British Academy / Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens, 1847–1849, edited by Graham Storey and K. J. Fielding, Oxford UP, 1980, p. 640. Vol. 5 of The British Academy / Pilgrim Edition of the Letters of Charles Dickens.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Penguin, 1967.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. The Old Curiosity Shop. Penguin, 2000.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. Penguin, 1997.Google Scholar
Dickens, Charles. Preface. Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop, pp. 7–8.Google Scholar
Edgeworth, Maria, and Lovell, Richard. Practical Education. Printed for Johnson, J., 1798. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. 1860. Penguin, 1979.Google Scholar
Frow, John. Character and Person. Oxford UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gray, Beryl. “Man and Dog: Text and Illustration in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop.” The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Brake, L. et al. , Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 97–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gross, Kenneth. Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life. U of Chicago P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosskurth, Phyllis. Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work. Hodder and Stoughton, 1986.Google Scholar
Gubar, Marah. Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children's Literature. Oxford UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Inglis, Katherine. “Becoming Automatous: Automata in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, vol. 6, 2008, pp. 1–39, https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.471.Google Scholar
James, Henry. “Our Mutual Friend.” The Nation, 21 Dec. 1865, pp. 786–87.Google Scholar
Kaiser, Matthew. The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept. Stanford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Kanwit, John Paul M. “‘People Mutht Be Amuthed’: Work, Play, and the Dickensian Disabled Child.” Dickens Studies Annual, vol. 47, 2016, pp. 33–56.Google Scholar
Ketabgian, Tamara. The Lives of Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature and Culture. U of Michigan P, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kincaid, James. Annoying the Victorians. Routledge, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “Love, Guilt and Reparation” and Other Works, 1921–1945. Vintage, 1998.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. The Psycho-analysis of Children. Translated by Strachey, Alix, Vintage, 1997.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “The Psycho-analytic Play Technique: Its History and Significance (1955).” “Envy and Gratitude” and Other Works, 1946–1963, Vintage, 1997, pp. 122–39.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “The Psychological Principles of Early Analysis (1926).” Klein, “ Love,” pp. 128–38.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “Symposium on Child Analysis (1927).” Klein, “ Love,” pp. 139–69.Google Scholar
Klein, Melanie. “Weaning (1936).” Klein, “ Love,” pp. 290–305.Google Scholar
Langbauer, Laurie. “Ethics and Theory: Suffering Children in Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Le Guin.” ELH, vol. 75, no. 1, spring 2007, pp. 89–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laubender, Carolyn. “Beyond Repair: Interpretation, Reparation, and Melanie Klein's Clinical Play-Technique.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, pp. 51–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, Heather. “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Criticism, vol. 52, no. 2, spring 2010, pp. 235–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lynch, Deidre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. U of Chicago P, 1998.Google Scholar
Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton UP, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayhew, Henry. The London Street-Folk. Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861. Vol. 3 of London Labour and the London Poor.Google Scholar
Michie, Helena. “‘Who Is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurement, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 22, no. 2, winter 1989, pp. 199–213.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. Victorian Subjects. Duke UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Moi, Toril. “Rethinking Character.” Character: Three Enquiries in Literary Studies, by Anderson, Amanda et al. , Chicago UP, 2019, pp. 27–75.Google Scholar
Moore, Ben. “The Doll's Dressmaker Re(ad)dressed: Jenny Wren's Critique of Childhood, Femininity, and Appearance.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 44, 2016, pp. 473–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neufeldt, Victor, editor. The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë, 1827–33. Routledge, 1997. Vol. 1 of The Works of Patrick Branwell Brontë.Google Scholar
Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens.” Essays, Penguin, 1994, pp. 35–78.Google Scholar
Schlicke, Paul. Dickens and Popular Entertainment. Routledge, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schor, Hilary M. Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 123–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speaight, George. The History of the English Puppet Theatre. 1955. Robert Hale, 1990.Google Scholar
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child; or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Duke UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Sussman, Herbert, and Joseph, Gerhard. “Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 32, no. 2, 2004, pp. 617–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swinburne, Algernon Charles. “The Greatness of Dickens.” Charles Dickens: A Bookman Extra Number, Hodder and Stoughton, 1914, pp. 180–85.Google Scholar
Van Ghent, Dorothy. “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers's.” The Sewanee Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1950, pp. 419–38.Google Scholar
Wiegman, Robyn. “The Times We're In: Queer Feminist Criticism and the Reparative Turn.” Feminist Theory, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014, pp. 4–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Elizabeth A. Gut Feminism. Duke UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton UP, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zieger, Susan. “Dickens's Queer Children.” Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 20, nos. 1–2, 2009, pp. 141–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar