Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People [Hardcover]

Studies Victorian parliamentiary literature in tandem with the novels of Charles Dickens as a means to explore the complex interaction of commercial literature with state experiments in publication.This book examines Charles Dickens's fiction alongside publications emanating from Parliament. It argues that Dickens and Parliament were engaged in competitive efforts to represent the People at a crucial moment in the history of representative democracy--when the British government was under enormous political pressure to expand the franchise beyond a narrow band of male landowners. Contending that fiction and the literature of Parliament interacted at a host of levels--jostling one another in the same bookshops--it reads Dickens's novels in tandem with blue books, the practice texts of shorthand manuals, and Dickens's journalism. It shows how his fiction mocks parliamentary form (as inPickwick Papers), canvasses the history of parliamentary representation (as inBleak House), and depicts the relation of the People to the state as well as commerce (as inLittle Dorrit). It thus rethinks the history of the Victorian novel by examining its rivalry with Parliament in the expanding world of print publication.Introduction: The Popular PressPart One: The Art of Representation1. Tracing Characters: Political Shorthand and the History of Writing2. Breach of Privilege: Reporting, Satire, and Reform3. Snoring for the Million: Pickwick and Parliamentary PublicationPart Two: A Parliamentary People4. Vagabonds: Suspicious Company in Oliver Twist5. Mirror of Bleak House: Haunting ParliamentPart Three: Decomposing Forms6. Blue Books in Hard Times7. Circumlocution: The Blood of the Book8. National Dustmen: Coal and PaperCoda: Victorian TwitterWorks CitedCarolyn Vellenga Berman,Associate Professor of Literature and Co-Chair of Literary Studies, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts, The New School, New York Cilƒ$