ABSTRACT
No account of “Victorian Vulgarity” would be complete without consideration of the striver and arriviste, the consummate narcissist, the wearer of loud clothing, the shockingly histrionic public reader of his work, the shameful self-promoter who made himself central to Victorian literary culture: Charles Dickens. Though he had published Sketches by Boz in 1836, his career effectively commenced with his embrace of serial publication for Pickwick Papers, a mode, he delighted in recalling ten years later, in the preface to the 1847 “Cheap Edition,” that his friends warned him “was a low, cheap form of publication, by which I should ruin all my rising hopes…” Nor did he shrink from adding, with unseemly smugness, “and how right my friends turned out to be, everybody now knows” (45).
