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3 results

  • 4 - After Criminality

  • from Part II - Demotic Celebrities
  • Lauren Gillingham, University of Ottawa
  • Book:
    Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
    Published online:
    11 May 2023
    Print publication:
    25 May 2023, pp 190-238

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 reads Charles Dickenss Barnaby Rudge (1841) and David Copperfield (1849–50) as sustained meditations on the visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture. These novels confirm the reverberations through British fiction of the temporality of fashion and its logics of currency and spectacle. The chapter analyzes Barnaby Rudge, a novel openly in conversation with the Newgate school, in terms of Dickens’s efforts to negate the criminal protagonist’s purchase on demotic celebrity, and to claim for respectable characters the possibilities for celebrity and publicness that the earlier crime novels had made imaginable. The chapter then offers a fresh take on David Copperfield that moves beyond biographical and psychoanalytic readings of the novel. I argue that Dickens shows in David Copperfield that by mid-century, an awareness of one’s own visibility has become an integral component of identity formation and a prerequisite to participation in social life.