Book contents
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- 3 Spectacular Objects
- 4 After Criminality
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
4 - After Criminality
Dickens and the Celebrity of Everyday Life
from Part II - Demotic Celebrities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 May 2023
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
- Fashionable Fictions and the Currency of the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Fashion and Its Vicissitudes
- Part I The Silver-Fork Novel and the Transient World
- Part II Demotic Celebrities
- 3 Spectacular Objects
- 4 After Criminality
- Part III Hypercurrency and the Sensation Novel
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Summary
Chapter 4 reads Charles Dickenss Barnaby Rudge (1841) and David Copperfield (1849–50) as sustained meditations on the visual figure of the public man and the communal work of celebrity culture. These novels confirm the reverberations through British fiction of the temporality of fashion and its logics of currency and spectacle. The chapter analyzes Barnaby Rudge, a novel openly in conversation with the Newgate school, in terms of Dickens’s efforts to negate the criminal protagonist’s purchase on demotic celebrity, and to claim for respectable characters the possibilities for celebrity and publicness that the earlier crime novels had made imaginable. The chapter then offers a fresh take on David Copperfield that moves beyond biographical and psychoanalytic readings of the novel. I argue that Dickens shows in David Copperfield that by mid-century, an awareness of one’s own visibility has become an integral component of identity formation and a prerequisite to participation in social life.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023