ABSTRACT
There appeared in 1880 a book by William Hurrell Mallock with the intriguing title of Is Life Worth Living? This is not a treatise on suicide, but it is about a demise. Its concern, like that of much contemporary discourse, is with the waning of religious faith and the consequences for existence. Mallock identifies a widespread ‘crisis’, at the centre of which lie a ‘negation of the supernatural’ and a concomitant ‘intense selfconsciousness . . . on the part of man as to his own prospects and his own position’. The ‘old spontaneity of action’, rooted in the ideals of rewards in heaven and obedience to divine law, has given way to the cultivation of this-worldly knowledge and success, ‘natural happiness’, under the aegis of the ‘positive school’ of scientific thought and progress.1 This is a restrained version of Carlyle’s strident lament for the ‘Everlasting No’ of a universe become ‘dead, immeasurable Steamengine’, a ‘machine . . . go[ing] by the wheel-and-pinion “motives”, selfinterests, checks’.2 It is also a theme at the heart of Dickens’s writing. The present study is, broadly speaking, an account of how this author reflects and responds to the unsettlement and stress of his era – his involvement in the question of, as Barry Qualls puts it, ‘the way man might live adequately in a world whose only certainty was flux’.3
