Dickens's Clowns: Charles Dickens, Joseph Grimaldi and the Pantomime of Life [Hardcover]

This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist. Arguing that the Memoirs should be read as integral to Dickens's wider creative project on the theatricality of everyday existence, Jonathan Buckmaster analyses how Grimaldi's clown stepped into many of Dickens's novels.This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist. Arguing that the Memoirs should be read as integral to Dickens's wider creative project on the theatricality of everyday existence, Jonathan Buckmaster analyses how Grimaldi's clown stepped into many of Dickens's novels.

Dickens's Clownspresents new readings of Dickens's treatment of topics such as identity, the grotesque and violence within the context of the tropes of the Regency pantomime. This is the first study to identify the Dickensian clown as a unifying force for several Dickensian themes, overturning traditional views of Dickens's clowns as peripheral figures.Acknowledgements
Table of Figures

1. Introduction
2. Pantomime and Pantomime Clowning
3. Dickens at the Pantomime
4. The Memoirs as NineteenthCentury Biography
5. George Cruikshank as cobiographer of the Memoirs
6. The Gluttonous Clown
7. The Slapstick Clown
8. The Clothed Clown

Bibliography
IndexEstablishes the importance of the popular radical figure of the pantomime clown in the work of Charles DickensJonathan Buckmasteris an independent scholar.