Laurence W. Mazzeno ,The Dickens Industry: Critical Perspectives, 1836–2005 by Laurence W. MazzenoReview by: John O. JordanNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 3 (December 2009), pp. 402-406Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/ncl.2009.64.3.402 .

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L a u r e n c e W . M a z z e n o , The Dickens Industry: Critical Perspectives, 1836–2005. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2008. Pp. viii + 317. $75.

As the 2012 bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth draws nearer, students and teachers of nineteenth-century lit-erature will need to brace themselves for the avalanche of celebratory

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events being planned to commemorate this important anniversary, as well as for the outpouring of articles, books, reviews, editorials, blog entries, films, and television series that will both precede it and follow in its wake. As this review is being written, a major new biography by the distinguished British Dickensian Michael Slater is announced as forthcoming from Yale University Press. A new high-tech animated version of A Christmas Carol, starring Jim Carrey, will soon be released by Disney and is being promoted by a multi-city train tour across the United States. Already a “Dickens 2012” website is available (http://www.dickens2012.org/), and many international conferences are in the works. Despite discouraging signs in other sectors of the economy, what Laurence Mazzeno aptly, and without much apparent irony, calls “the Dickens industry” is gearing up for an increase in production.

The Dickens Industry: Critical Perspectives, 1836–2005 offers a valuable survey of critical responses to Dickens from 1836, the year of Sketches by Boz, up to the present time (2005 is the terminus an-nounced in its title, but the latest item listed in the bibliography dates from 2008). A worthy successor to George Ford’s Dickens and His Readers: Aspects of Novel-Criticism since 1836 (1955), Mazzeno’s study is the most recent entry in the “Literary Criticism in Perspective” series published by Camden House, which includes books on Alfred Ten-nyson, Matthew Arnold (both also by Mazzeno), Edward Lear, Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, and many other world authors.

Divided into nine chapters and an introduction, The Dickens Industry is organized in chronological fashion. It begins with an overview of critical responses to Dickens during his lifetime and includes chap-ters on Dickens and “the Reaction against Victorianism (1870–1914),” “Dickens among the Moderns (1915–1940),” and “The Dickens Cen-tenary and After (1970–1979).” The book concludes with two chap-ters on “Dickens in an Age of Theory” and with a short prospective chapter on “The Future of Dickens Studies: Trends in the Twenty-First Century.” As he explains in his introduction, Mazzeno does not attempt to cover everything ever written about Dickens. He specifi-cally excludes treatments of individual passages or entire novels and refrains from significant comment on adaptations of Dickens’s work for film and television. Books are privileged over articles, though with many exceptions, and discussion is weighted toward more recent crit-ical examination.

Faced with the difficulty of organizing such a vast corpus of mate-rial into a coherent narrative, Mazzeno adopts several strategies be-sides simple chronology. In addition to the industrial analogy that provides his title, he adopts three other key metaphors: marketplace,

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tidal movement, and religious affiliation. The first third of the book treats Dickens as a commodity whose “value” rises and falls in the mar-ketplace of critical opinion as judgments about his literary merits are debated by writers both within and outside the academy. Beginning in 1940, however, by which time Dickens’s value is beginning to seem more secure, the marketplace metaphor yields to one of horizontal fluc-tuation. “The Tide Turns (1940–1959)” boldly announces chapter 4, and from this point on we read of the ins and outs of critical fashion and new “waves” of theoretical or methodological approach.

Finally, in an effort to clarify the complex field of recent theo-retically influenced work on Dickens, Mazzeno adopts a language of discipleship. Bert Hornback is “a disciple of J. Hillis Miller”; Ian Dun-can is “a disciple of Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson”; D. A. Miller is an “American disciple” of Foucault; Anny Sadrin is “a protégée of Sylvère Monod”; Gareth Cordery is “another disciple of Foucault and D. A. Miller.” And so on. Whether these scholars would always recog-nize themselves in such characterizations is an open question.

Any taxonomy of modern critical response to an author as com-plex as Dickens will necessarily rely to some extent on labels and sim-plifications. For Mazzeno the principal division is between work that is “theory-based” and work that is “traditional” (sometimes also called “liberal” or “humanist”). His two chapters on Dickens “in an Age of Theory” are subtitled “New Theories, New Readings” and “The Persis-tence of Traditional Criticism.” Again, one might question this simple, two-part division as well as the implication that work by “traditional” critics lacks any theoretical foundation. Within the chapter on “new theories, new readings,” critics are grouped together under several subheadings: “Studies of Language, Authorship, and the Represen-tation of Reality”; “Feminism and Women’s Studies”; “Psychological Criticism”; and “Marxist, New Historicist, and Sociological Readings.” The vocabulary of discipleship blends here with one of religious (or critical) sectarianism.

Lest the preceding paragraph create the false impression that Mazzeno consistently oversimplifies complex phenomena, it should be noted that The Dickens Industry provides many fair, accurate summa-ries of major works in the Dickens critical canon. It includes percep-tive, detailed discussions of studies by George Gissing, G. K. Chester-ton, George Bernard Shaw, and George Orwell, among older critics, and by Edmund Wilson, Humphry House, Hillis Miller, and the Leavises among those writing after 1940. It offers discerning analyses of the four principal Dickens biographies, by John Forster, Edgar John-son, Fred Kaplan, and Peter Ackroyd, and provides astute, succinct

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commentary on particular controversies within Dickens studies. The book is also a trove of useful information. Not even the most widely read Dickensian will be familiar with every item that Mazzeno discusses.

Inevitably some items are overlooked. There is no mention of Claire Tomalin’s study of Dickens and Ellen Ternan, The Invisible Woman (1990); no mention of the useful series of bibliographies of individual novels published by Garland; no mention of the impor-tant Dickens Companion series published originally by Unwin, subse-quently by Edinburgh University Press, and now taken over by Helm; and little attention to electronic sources. Critics from outside Britain and North America are mentioned infrequently. Theodor Adorno appears as an influence on new historicist approaches, but not as the author of an essay on The Old Curiosity Shop. Postcolonial responses—e.g. by V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Peter Carey—are absent altogether.

An especially useful aspect of Mazzeno’s work is his attention to historical and institutional contexts—for example, the way in which Dickens was mobilized by British critics during World Wars One and Two in support of the idea of Englishness. In his chapter on “The Dickens Centenary and After,” Mazzeno provides an excellent analy-sis of the impact of the 1970 centenary, linking it to the founding of Dickens Studies Annual and Dickens Studies Newsletter (now Dickens Quarterly) and to the publication of important studies by, among others, Barbara Hardy, John Lucas, A. E. Dyson, H. M. Daleski, the Leavises, Raymond Williams, Alexander Welsh, and James Kincaid, all within a year of each other. Dickens 2012 should only prove to be so productive.

It is surprising that, in his discussion of the 1970 centenary observances, Mazzeno neglects to mention what was probably the single most important Dickens conference of that year, the one held in Edmonton and organized by Juliet and Rowland McMaster. The Edmonton conference featured papers by Hillis Miller, Steven Mar-cus, Ian Watt, Philip Collins, Sylvère Monod, and John M. Robson, a distinguished international panel. Mazzeno makes no reference to the three most significant papers delivered at this conference: Watt’s “Oral Dickens” (published in Dickens Studies Annual in 1974), Mar-cus’s “Language into Structure: Pickwick Revisited” (published in Daedalus in 1972), and Miller’s essay, published originally as the “In-troduction” to his valuable 1971 Penguin edition of Bleak House and often reprinted. The omission of any reference to Miller’s introduc-tion is especially glaring, as it is probably the first poststructuralist es-

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say written on Dickens and, as such, a significant marker in the larger narrative that Mazzeno seeks to construct. Hillis Miller’s essay also figures importantly in the history of Dickens criticism in relation to D. A. Miller’s influential book, The Novel and the Police (1988), where the younger Miller engages his senior colleague in a lengthy polemi-cal footnote, prompting Alexander Welsh in a witty allusion to the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit (in his Dickens Redressed: The Art of “Bleak House” and “Hard Times” [2000]) to describe this encounter as the famous case of Miller and Miller.

Given its stated goals and the inevitable limitations of any survey of such a vast body of information, the shortcomings of The Dickens Industry are relatively minor. Dickensians and readers of Victorian fic-tion will find here a reliable guide to trends in Dickens studies and a useful starting point for reflection on future directions.

John O. JordanUniversity of California, Santa Cruz

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