Difference between revisions of "Litvack 2015"

Latest revision as of 13:43, 14 March 2018

Leon Litvack. "Dickens and the Codebreakers: The Annotated Set of All the Year Round." Dickens Quarterly, Volume 32, Number 4, December 2015, pp. 313-337. Web.

• 315-6 Dickens on the omniscient "we" of anonymously-authored Household Words: “The drive towards anonymity in his journals was clearly important to Dickens, as he indicated to Elizabeth Gaskell in January 1850:

“No writer’s name will be used – neither my own, nor any others – every paper will be published without any signature; and all will seem to express the general mind and purpose of the Journal, which is, the raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition." (Letters 6: 62) Though he eventually modified this strategy – particularly with respect to his own serial fiction – he pressed consistently for the development of a powerful, unified identity, communicated through a fusion of voices into a single entity, which he initially termed “a certain SHADOW, …a kind of semi-omniscient, omnipresent, intangible creature,” which, he said, “may go into any place … and be in all homes, and all nooks and corners, and be supposed to be cognisant of everything, and go everywhere, without the least difficulty” (Letters 5: 622).”

• • interesting implications for Bleak House (1853) and other considerations of authorship and periodical/novel form: Brake 2001, The Warden (Trollope, 1855)