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The Night Side of Dickens: Cannibalism, Passion, Necessity, by Harry Stone; pp. xxx + 726. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1994, $65.00, L39.50.
This new book by Harry Stone is somehow a sequel to Dickens and the Invisible World: Fairy Tales, Fantasy, and Novel-Making (1979), except that now the author has moved from the sunny to the night side of Dickens. Otherwise, he proceeds on similar lines, connecting the formative and the creative years of the novelist, trying to find the seminal sources, "literary sources and lived sources," that "helped fashion the nature of much of his art" (55) and might "bring us closer to the shrouded regions ... that veil the mysteries of creation" (344). But the veil remains unlifted and all the critic can do is draw our attention to "interrelated networks of ... motifs" (15), "contrapuntal variations" (155), "dark resonances in Dickens' fabling consciousness" (13), before coming to the conclusion that those haunting and disturbing recurrences "can only make us wonder" at those mysteries (425).
The first and by far the longest part of the book is devoted to Dickens's "lifelong obsession with cannibalism" (267). The subject is by no means new, but the strength of Stone's study rests on the wealth of information and meticulous stock-taking of sources, ranging from Dickens's boyhood recollections of his nurse's stories to his early readings of horrendous tales or of gruesome reports in sensational magazines. In spite of its grim subject, this part is the most entertaining, for it inevitably appeals to our own fascination with cannibalism, "the attraction of repulsion," as Dickens himself called the ambivalent response we all have to horror, a response which accounts for the long-lasting popularity of ogreish folklore and the success of scandal sheets. Besides his references to...