ABSTRACT
Ford Madox Ford’s unscholarly distinction between the “English nuvvle,” that is, “commercial ... solid three-deckers” and the “novel of aloofness,” “rendering the world ... uttering no comments, falsifying no issues,” affords an original take on the Victorian Modernist divide. Indeed Ford, through his proximity with both Henry James and Joseph Conrad, is a major transitional figure in any reflection on the shift between the Victorian age – he is the grandson of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown – and Modernism – he is the famous author of The Good Soldier (1915), a much-praised modernist fiction. Through his undisciplined exploration of English fiction, Ford blurs any simplistic, binary dichotomy between what would pass for a reactionary Victorian age and an artistically innovative Modernist period, by enlisting writers like Meredith and Trollope amongst the representatives of the theory of aloofness, whilst showing that the stilted English nuvvle was to persist well into the first decades of the new twentieth century.
The aim of this chapter is to argue that Charles Dickens is, to a large extent, not reducible to any easy distinction between Victorianism and Modernism, even if he is, most legitimately, considered as the canonical, paradigmatic Victorian novelist. This would invalidate any progressive, teleological approach to literary studies and partly justify Ford Madox Ford’s off-the-beaten-track, labyrinthine exploration of the English novel, a method also favored by Peter Ackroyd, another iconoclastic Dickensian.
