Dickens on Growing Up and Growing Older: David Copperfield and Great Expectations

Catalog description

Charles Dickens was certainly the most popular - and arguably the most socially engaged - of Victorian novelists. Dickens cultivated his relationship with his audience, which clamored for his serially-released novels, an enthusiasm for attenuated publication that we, post-Harry Potter readers and tv series watchers, certainly understand. Victorians read his work for its art, its humor, and its fervent report of the joys and the inequities of the world they shared. Historians and sociologists still go to him for that first-hand report; readers continue to be charmed by his brilliant narratives, his unforgettable characters. He was the energetic originator of the Victorian social novel and what we would today call a campaigner for social justice. He is less well known as a contemplative writer, one who reflects on his own memories. But in two important novels, David Copperfield (1849-50) and Great Expectations (1860-61), Dickens, in the voice of a first-person narrator, investigates the larger emotional and psychological issues of his own life. These novels present brilliant, and very different, fictional auto-biographies, and we will be reading them carefully - and in serial parts - with an eye to Dickens' self-awareness, tone, humor, reflections, and conclusions. This IntroSem will expect informed participation, a presentation based on primary materials contemporary with the novels' publication, and a final research project. You'll be encouraged to investigate issues and publications of Dickens' own day, and will be happy, I think, to spend time with some of the remarkable newspapers and journals that helped form 19th-century culture.