ABSTRACT
Writing in 1833 in England and the English, Edward Bulwer Lytton, lifelong friend of Charles Dickens, saw the death of Lord Byron in 1824 as marking a historic transition: When Byron passed away, the feeling he had represented craved utterance no more. Byronism functions for Dickens, not simply as a negative indicator of true fulfilment and value, a ‘bad life’ that defines or in certain cases changes to become a ‘good life’, but as a locus of positive creative attention. Henry Pelham may well have influenced Dickens; certainly it constitutes a well-defined bridge from one era to another, at once mediating the Byronic legacy and setting new cultural goals. In Dickens command of the social hierarchy is transferred from the upper to the middle class, and this is done in part through his own iconography of embodied and disembodied forms.
