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ANDREW MANGHAM, Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidencel Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016, pp. xvi + 253. ISBN: 9780414213247. ?68.74.
Andrew Mangham's book is one of those, like Claire Wood's recent Dickens and the Business of Death, which is interested in Dickens and dead bodies. Mangham also discusses the dead city and dead streets, as Dickens refers to these in Sketches by Boz (135), thus beginning an interesting section on fixity and on the appearance of death as applied to the city, not just to people. This is a carefully researched, well-referenced, well-illustrated monograph on what counted for evidence in Dickens's time and slightly earlier, and it probes some real-life murders which made the headlines, some of which, when they came to trial, Dickens commented on, often with surprisingly intense curiosity. Works discussed include Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers (which pays off well for this book) Oliver Twist and Bleak House. In the last he discusses Dickens and G.H. Lewes's clash over spontaneous combustion (I recently asked a doctor-friend whether he accepted spontaneous combustion: he replied, 'speaking as a scientist, no, speaking as a doctor, yes'). There is also work on Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. About the latter, Mangham argues, interestingly, that the Thames river symbolises a 'thwarted wish to know something': that is, 'the desire to...