Charles Dickens’s Realism and the Romantic Essayists

Through a series of textual comparisons between Leigh Hunt’s essays and Charles Dickens’s early city sketches, this article uncovers a neglected genealogy for Dickens’s realistic depictions of the ordinary subject. From establishing Dickens’s debt to the Romantic essayists more generally, I go on to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Studies in English literature, 1500-1900 1500-1900, 2021-09, Vol.60 (4), p.761-781
Main Author: Natarajan, Uttara
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthologies
British & Irish literature
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
English literature
Essays
Ethics
Foregrounding
Genre
Realism
Romantic period
Source studies
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Summary:Through a series of textual comparisons between Leigh Hunt’s essays and Charles Dickens’s early city sketches, this article uncovers a neglected genealogy for Dickens’s realistic depictions of the ordinary subject. From establishing Dickens’s debt to the Romantic essayists more generally, I go on to elicit a key distinction. In the essayists’ representations, detail conduces to the construction of a self; in Dickens’s, it signals a close attention to the other. Detail, then, is the marker of the ethical relation modeled in Dickens’s style of ordinariness. Foregrounding this style, I reassert Dickens’s contribution to the developing realism of the mid-nineteenth century.
ISSN:0039-3657
1522-9270
1522-9270
DOI:10.1353/sel.2020.0031