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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Description, Projection, and Charles Dickens

  • Timothy Gao, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • Book:
    Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel
    Published online:
    06 April 2021
    Print publication:
    15 April 2021, pp 139-173
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  • Summary

    This final chapter addresses the concreteness of fictional experiences on which Brontë’s, Trollope’s, and Thackeray’s various uses of the novel depend. I examine nineteenth-century medical responses to Coleridge’s paracosmic play, in particular their cautions against imagined environments as precursors to hallucination, and the continuity of this discourse with more general anxieties about fictional or poetic experience; for instance, George Henry Lewes singled out Dickens as an author who shared his pseudo-hallucinations through novels. This view of novel-reading as imaginative sensory participation has since been overshadowed by the cinematic and the digital, but represents an important precedent for the everyday presence of non-material things and spaces. In a reading of Little Dorrit, where multiple characters form their unrealised hopes and plans into fantasised environments, I argue that play, hallucination, and fiction provided nineteenth-century critics with tools to conceptualise a phenomenology of the virtual, or even its reparative value.