Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition

Kelly Hager. Dickens and the Rise of Divorce: The Failed-Marriage Plot and the Novel Tradition. Farnham [Surrey UK]: Ashgate, 2010. Pp. viii + 206. $89.95.

As I sat down to write this review, my copy of the TLS arrived; included was an "In Brief" review of Holly Furneaux's Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (August 6, 2010; 26). Although Kelly Hager's book is not about homosexuality, it is certainly about the failure of traditional heterosexual marriage in the Victorian age, both in fiction and in reality. Problematic gender relations in Dickens continue to be scrutinized, evidently, in the critical literature; and although Hager examines only earlyto mid-career novels, her contribution is to argue for a deep and pervasive insistence on failed marriage within them. Hager particularly wants us to reconsider the dominance of the courtship plot in the nineteenth century novel in light of what she calls the "failed-marriage plot."

Hager does more than catalogue unsuccessful marriages. She asks why, given their prevalence, we cling so tenaciously to the notion that the courtship plot dictates the shape of the Anglo-American nineteenth-century novel. She is especially concerned to examine the interaction between the courtship and the failed-marriage plots, an interaction that readers have been trained to overlook.

Why Dickens? Hager offers an outdated sense of Dickens as "the novelist of hearth and home, the inventor of Christmas, genial paterfamilias" (23). Surely the wealth of recent critical and biographical studies on Dickens, even before Furneaux's recent contribution, has laid to rest the cheerful Dickens of the first half of the twentieth century, a stereotype she acknowledges in a note as largely his own creation (45). Nonetheless, Hager's claim that Dickens "is the Victorian novelist who perhaps best embodies stereotypical notions of...