Content area
Full Text
Robert L. Patten, ed. Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. xlvii + 647. $300; £160.
By the twenty-first century, has print culture now become the default lens for historical readings of Dickens? Groundbreaking scholarship by Catherine Waters, John O. Jordan, Juliet John and others has now firmly situated Dickens at the heart of numerous networks of print, commodity and literary culture. In their recent biographies of Dickens, Michael Slater stresses Dickens's lifelong energetic labor as a committed man of literary business in a range of practices far beyond the solitary activity of writing novels, and Claire Tomalin places him at the center of a group of professionalized "young men" of letters making good.
More of this story remains still to be told, as is shown in the enormous anthology, Dickens and Victorian Print Cultures, one of Ashgate's six-volume "Library of Essays on Charles Dickens." This volume is edited by Robert L. Patten, who has done more than any other to uncover Dickens's place in the story of Victorian print, which, he claims, "discovered Charles Dickens long before Dickensians discovered print culture" ("Introduction," i). Dickens is often seen as a man who had made himself into an icon of sober, industrious, mid-Victorian literary success - and he is still seen this way not least because of the mythmaking conducted by his first biographer John Forster and by Dickens himself. (Patten's monograph Dickens and Boz has recently interrogated the making of this myth, and clearly the two volumes have productively informed each other; in this collection, Gerard Curtis also writes adroitly on the Maclise portrait of Dickens more literally as a visual icon). The truth, of course, was far more complex than this, as Dickens is shown here and elsewhere to have benefited from numerous historical innovations in technology, advertizing, literacy, copyright, railways, postage, and paper production. Dickens's is both the least and the most typical Victorian literary success story; indeed it might be said that it was Victorian print culture, not the author himself, that had made Dickens - that the Dickens phenomenon and the growth ofVictorian print...