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SMALL, HELEN. "The Debt to Society: Dickens, Fielding, and the Genealogy of Independence," The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition, ed. Francis O' Gorman and Kathleen Turner. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. 14-40.
Dickens named his eighth child Henry Fielding Dickens. Dickens's admiration of Fielding and influence, long supposed, is examined with thoroughness and subtlety. Because the once-popular source/ analogue study is out of fashion, Ms. Small uses Nietzsche's comments upon "indebtedness" in his Genealogy of Morals (as redacted by Jacques Derrida) for heft. Indebtedness, in this account, is ambivalent, involving respect and fear, guilt and duty.
Dickens,...