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ELIZABETH A. CAMPBELL, Fortune's Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time, Ohio University Press, 2003, pp. xxiii + 253. ISBN 0-8214-15I4-X. $42.95.
Elizabeth Campbell has written a very fine and engaging book about Dickens, women and time - but in other ways, she might be said to have written several very different books, each with its own particular strengths, but with some interesting areas of disconnection (indeed, even disagreement) between them. Fortune's Wheel is at once a study of the iconography of fortune in the English tradition, and more particularly in Victorian fiction; a meditative engagement with the changing nature of time, and particularly of what the author calls 'women's time', in the industrial age; and an extended treatment of Dickens's mature fiction, from Dombey and Son through Great Expectations. Campbell offers a rich history of Fortune, from her stint as a pagan goddess to Machiavelli's interventions in her story, on through the eighteenth-century innovations of Fielding and Hogarth, her greatest modern avatars. From Fielding and Hogarth it is, of course, an easy step to Dickens, and to Dickens's great transformations in Fortune's fortunes - and, in Campbell's most promising critical move, Fortune's interference in Dickens's fiction. But along the way, Campbell also displays an impressive amount of research in Fortune's iconography, in the literary and visual traditions that gave Dickens the elements of his craft, and the biographical elements of Dickens's life that made him in turn susceptible to Fortune's lure, her most persistent suitor, and her most astute critic.
The subtle treatment Campbell offers of Fortune's visual history is rich and thorough, perhaps a little too much so for the perfect balance of the book, but any reader of Dickens will appreciate her careful attention particularly to Fortune's images when we reach sources we know are close to Dickens's heart: Hogarth's South Sea Scheme and Industry and Idleness; the street literature that, in the form of chapbooks like "The History of Fortunatus', gave Dickens the story of Fortunatus's magic purse. As Campbell traces these texts and their iconographic complexity, we see Fortune's magic wheel become Ixion's instrument of torture and Saint...