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Grahame Smith. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. Pp. 206. $79.95. Paper $24.95, £14-99.
Almost forty years ago, Taylor Stoehr set out to explore the dream elements in Dickens's writing. Dickens: The Dreamer's Stance (1965) offered a persuasive analysis of the visual nature of Dickens's style and the heightened nature he achieved through various figures of speech. Stoehr illustrated how anaphora and metonymy played a distinctive role, operating both locally to reveal through outer details the inner life of characters and more broadly to impart direction to the narrative enterprise of the major novels. He also noted how the language of the cinema provided a useful perspective on Dickens's style, how his way of seeing had roots in the material aspects of Victorian culture, and how his novels, so popular and successful among his readers, "have so much in common" with the movies and have been "so notably translatable into the film medium" (285).
Grahame Smith's compact and elegant Dickens and the Dream of Cinema covers much the same ground. His study, like Stoehr's, pays close attention to Dickens's language, to the way he arranges words on the page, to those expressive qualities that make him distinctive. Smith, like Stoehr, points to the visual, hallucinatory aspects of Dickens's language as those that most intimately link his writing with dreaming and dreaming in turn as a mode most characteristic of the cinema. Smith also considers the visual culture that helped shape Dickens's vision and how, in turn, Dickens developed and influenced a new way of seeing. As Smith states, drawing on Walter Benjamin's aphorism, "every epoch sees in images the epoch which is to succeed it." Rephrased and succinctly expropriated by Smith, Dickens dreamed the cinema. Or, more discursively, Dickens "anticipates in images the medium that would only come into being after his death" (1). Given the shared interests of the two critics, to what extent is Dickens and the Dream of the Cinema a departure?
A second look at Stoehr's concerns can be justified on several grounds,...