Dickens Quarterly

The subtitle of Adam Abraham's Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel immediately signals the complexity of its subject matter. Imitation, Parody, Aftertext: these terms complicate our understanding of "plagiarism," so often deployed as a pejorative term signaling one-dimensional mimicry. Abraham's study illuminates the multifaceted and sometimes surprising ways in which the Victorian novel inspired creative engagement, engagement that often transgressed the boundaries of mere imitation and lent these "plagiarist" texts vivid afterlives in their own right. The word plagiarism has a rich etymology, as Abraham points out, tracing its origins to the Latin for kidnapping. Exploring the history of the term, and its associated concepts–copyright, adaptation, and parody–Abraham aims to offer "a new kind of reception history" (19).

This research is both timeless and timely. As Abraham points out, "unoriginality is nothing new" (1), and the book begins with a survey of historical attitudes to what Gérard Genette terms "literature in the second degree," from Plato's forms to Aristotle's mimesis, from Romantic creatio to [End Page 302] "canonical writers who, at different times, have been accused of pilfering from others: Chaucer, Montaigne, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster, Milton, Molière, Voltaire, Sterne, Scott, Coleridge, Tennyson, Dickens, George Eliot–a veritable Norton anthology of literature" (4). He focuses on the "aftertexts" of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton and George Eliot, a trio chosen partly because they generated unusually "intense, immediate, and sustained" engagement (21), and partly because "they originated something–namely, an array of aftertexts and authors seeking to replicate a literary brand" (185). The literary oeuvre as brand–identity, source of income and entity demanding legal protection–irrigates the book, offering useful implications for how we might further investigate the commercial and legal questions entwined with Victorian authorship.

Although many of the texts Abraham explores–penny weeklies, anonymous reviews, parodies and correspondence–may hitherto have been viewed as "excrescences […] peripheral to the study of literature and the arts" (19), he argues convincingly for the value of such texts: they record at least one reader's response; they "make the originals original in that they originated something" (20); and they often shaped the reception, and thus the careers, of individual novelists. These responses thus enrich our understanding of canonical writers: "one cannot produce a canon unless there is something that is not in it" (20).

Dickens scholars will be drawn to the first two chapters, "The Pickwick Phenomenon" and "Charles Dickens and the Pseudo-Dickens Industry." Identifying a gap in existing scholarship on Pickwickian aftertexts, Abraham observes an "infectious" quality in the plagiarism spawned by the Pickwick phenomenon, extending to "jest books, songbooks, extra illustrations, allographic sequels, adaptations, and imitations" (29). He focuses primarily on print material from the peak of the Pickwick period, 1837 to 1842–although, as he points out, it is precisely the "non-teleological nature" of the novel that contributes to its imitable potential, even today (56). The corpus is subdivided into two categories: "club imitations," reviving the "abandoned frame" of the Pickwick Club, and "prostheses," texts that "expand Pickwick beyond the limitations set by Dickens's narrative" (30). The primary focus is on how these texts identify "some of the more subterranean elements of Dickens's work," offering crude representations of sexuality and racism "that seem, in a word, un-Pickwickian" (42) and, equally significantly, offering "working-class readings of a middle-class text" (48). These, Abraham argues, "uncover the Pickwick that they want to read or need to believe or desire" (54), and he thus encourages us to re-read Pickwick as "a mode, a formula, an invitation to invent" (57).

In Chapter Two, Abraham grapples with the term "Dickensian," noting that the word's first recorded usage in 1881 referred to an imitative text. [End Page 303] This chapter develops our understanding of the term through reading "Dickensian" aftertexts–particularly Bos's Nickelas Nickelbery (1838–39)–before exploring how Dickens himself responded to such imitative onslaughts by altering his own narrative...