ABSTRACT
THE SUBJECT OF this chapter—the unstable and shifting nature of a Dickens novel and of our response to it—developed as the result of a considerable instability of my own. Having agreed some time before to participate in a certain panel discussion, I suddenly became ludicrously confused as to whether the subject to be addressed was "Dickens in This Time" or "Dickens in His Time." I thought it was the former; it turned out to be the latter, a historical topic presenting itself to my competence about equally with particle physics and alchemy. Panic can spur a sort of ingenuity, and puzzling over whether there was, after all, much of a difference between "this" and "his" pushed me naturally enough (you'll agree) to consider the relationship between a recovered context for interpretation (biographical, historical, sociological, political) and interpretations which deliberately ignore those contexts, which, in fact, flaunt them, running counter to stated authorial intentions, what we take to be Victorian beliefs and predilections, or even (most of all) common sense. What about subversive readings, those antagonistic to, or ignorant of, what history seems to be telling us?
