ABSTRACT
The introduction discusses the role of affect in Dickens’s work as questions of intensities and style. Beginning with a reading of Dickens’s Christmas book The Chimes, it outlines how Dickens’s texts create these intensities by deploying a conjunction of narrative strategies, rhetorical constructions, and representations and solicitations of emotions in unremitting focus on poverty and precarity. The results, it argues, are Dickensian affects, ways of feeling bound up with the representations of economic, political, and embodied precarity. By yoking emotions, sentiments, and feelings to particular styles and ways of representing experiences of insecurity, exclusion, and ungrievability, Dickens constructs ways of feeling precarity under capitalism that remain present and important for readers in the twenty-first century.
