ABSTRACT
WITH DlCKENS ONE CANNOT OVERSTATE THE OBVIOUS: DlCKENS WAS A topical writer. Not only did he play a pivotal role in the economic and institutional transformation of the literary field that began in the late 1830s, but he also converted his novelistic prestige into a voice of considerable social authority. Dickens wrote about orphanages and slums, about factory conditions and debtor prisons, about education and marriage, about the urban poor and the state bureaucracy, about outlaws and guardians, about the railways and industrial towns, and about vagaries of work and vagaries of law. As a public figure, he was tirelessly active in support of social reform, and while he stayed away from institutional politics, he espoused causes such as international copyright and emendation of domestic copyright laws, supported civic associations and organizations such as Governesses’ Benevolent Institution and Commercial Travelers’s Schools, provided shelter for homeless women, and tried to put together an organization to help the needy and struggling writers and artists-to name but a few things that Dickens supported. He saw his public mission as a medium for expressing and directing public sentiment: as “Conductor” of Household Words. Dickens took on the task of presenting stories of “many moving lessons of compassion and consideration,” imagining a unanimity of response connecting innumerable households: “a multitude moved by one sympathy.”2 In that sense, Dickens did not only aspire to conduct his contributors, but his audiences as well-so as to mobilize them by uniform sentiment. Such ambition was ridiculed by some of the literati: for instance, Dickens received an unflattering portrait as Mr Popular Sentiment in Trollope’s 1855 novel The Warden. But even as the novel relentlessly parodied Dickens, Trollope’s narrator was not altogether facetious when he intoned that “[i]f the world is to be set right, the work will be done by shilling number:”3 the idea that popular literature could create public sentiment for social reform was the result of an enormous increase of social authority that the novel enjoyed following Dickens’s rise to fame.
