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  • Dialogic Dickens. Invention and Transformation ed. by Allan C. Christensen, Francesco Marroni, and David Paroissien
  • Francesca Orestano
Allan C. Christensen, Francesco Marroni, David Paroissien, eds. Dialogic Dickens. Invention and Transformation. Chieti, Edizioni Solfanelli, 2015. Pp. 296. €21.00.

The celebration of Dickens’s bicentenary, marked, as we know, by a considerable number of events in England and all around the world, has generated as a consequence an equal number of books that cover substantial new ground – no doubt because of the many dialogic opportunities offered by the conferences, symposia and seminars of 2012. The University of Chieti, under the aegis of a well-known Dickensian, Francesco Marroni, hosted three seminars and one international conference: the result is this book, where the dialogic energy of Dickens’s texts provides the ideal backbone to a variety of critical perspectives.

The dialogic element within the text is explored by Allan Christensen in his analysis of Barnaby Rudge, where the raven Grip and the narrator’s voice share a marked degree of unreliability, which in the episodes of the Gordon riots breaks up into sheer violence and fragmentation of sense. Marroni portrays the ordeal of Redlaw, the protagonist of The Haunted Man as the predicament of a modern Dr. Faustus, or Victor Frankenstein. Dickens transforms the alchemist into the contemporary chemist: threatened with the loss of memory, and confronting the empty horizon of a world where scientific [End Page 322] knowledge erases all humanity – a desert of sands “tossed into unintelligible heaps” – Redlaw has his only chance of salvation in Christmas, memory and forgiveness. David Paroissien focuses on Bleak House, and on the subtle modulations chosen by the writer for his portrait of Sir Leicester Dedlock. Paroissien reminds us of a remark by Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, during the wreath-laying ceremony in Westminster Abbey many of us attended on 7 February 2012: Williams selected Sir Leicester as a remarkable figure owing to his compassion and mercy (Dickens Quarterly June 2102). Paroissien concludes that here Dickens’s achievement results from the combination of “an outsider’s sociological view with the talent of the novelist, and his unconventional imagination.” Andrew Mangham focuses on Dickens’s early journalism, when his talent as resurrectionist was nourished by contemporary medical culture. The result would be a winning combination of clinical style, objective, dry, dispassionate, with sly touches of subjectivity kindling the expression of emotions.

Dialogues with time and space are examined by Enrichetta Soccio through the lens of domesticity to reveal an inner topography that contradicts how homes or dwellings such as Satis House, Bleak House or Tom-all-Alone’s are named. Tania Zullli examines the attitude of the young writer who visits the United States, and in the text of American Notes decides to solve the clash between his former dreams of democracy and the stern reality he encounters by adopting a discursive strategy in which subjective viewpoint (and his disappointment) alternate with passages dutifully written as objective travelogue. A fine dialogic interlacing of responses to Venice is traced by Maria Luisa De Rinaldis, who examines how Dickens, Ruskin and James used the city. Both Pictures from Italy and Little Dorrit dwell on the dream-like quality of the place, ominously enhanced by its fluid aquatic glimmer, so as to suggest at once the theatrical nature of its space, and a sense of performance that even a tourist cannot escape. Ruskin and James (and Marcel Proust, I may add, who introduces Venice at first sub specie of a dream) would share similar feelings, despite differences in style and in the office Venice performs in their writings.

Closer to home, Dickens’s response to the Great Exhibition of 1851 provides the next subject. Seen as a “horrible nuisance” by Dickens, Roberto Baronti Marchiò examines the novelist’s reaction to the Crystal Palace in the context of contemporary culture, tracing in Dickens’s comments distaste for an excess of wealth on display – all the more bewildering in view of the neglect of conditions at the margin of society. Another aspect of the cultural prism that engages Dickens’s attention is public education. Renzo D’Agnillo examines the debate that led to Forster’s Education...

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