Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition/The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James

KELLY HAGER, Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The FailedMarriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Ashgate, 2010, pp. ix+206. ISBN 978-0-7546-6947-0. £50.00

CHARLES HATTEN, The End of Domesticity: Alienation from the Family in Dickens, Eliot, and James. University of Delaware Press, 2010, pp. 316. ISBN 978-0-87413-075-1. £59.95

Two new studies of Dickensian family dynamics, Kelly Hager 's Dickens and the Rise of Divorce and Charles Hatten's The End of Domesticity, each analyse fictional families, particularly spouses, who fall short of the Victorian close-knit, happily-married ideal. Both volumes contribute valuably to the critical discussion of Victorian domesticity that has flourished since the late 1980s and both offer new, revisionist readings of Dickens.

Hager's groundbreaking study offers a new paradigm for reading the marriage plot in Victorian fiction. Challenging the critical privileging of the courtship plot, which stems from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) and is evident even in such foundational works on domesticity as Nancy Armstrong's Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987) and Mary Poovey's Uneven Developments (1988), Hager reveals a counter-narrative of failed marriages in eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels. Analysing Dickens's disintegrating fictional marriages as 'case studies' in this counter- tradition, in which the failed-marriage plot 'complements and competes with the courtship plot' (6), Hager examines 'monstrous...