Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition
Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb
About This Book
‘Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition’ is a timely study of the ‘sentimental’ in Dickens’ novels, which places them in the context of the tradition of Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan and Lamb. This study re-evaluates Dickens’ presentation of emotion – first within the eighteenth-century tradition and then within the dissimilar nineteenth-century tradition – as part of a complex literary heritage that enables him to critique nineteenth-century society.
The book sheds light on the construction of feelings and of the ‘good heart’, ideas which resonate with current critical debates about literary ‘affect’. As the text argues, such an analysis reveals sentimentalism to be a crucial element in fully understanding the achievement of Dickens and his contemporaries.
The first chapter of the book outlines the sentimentalist tradition in English literature from the Middle Ages onwards. The second and third chapters then examine Dickens’ eighteenth-century inheritance in the works of Sterne, Fielding, Goldsmith and Sheridan, whilst chapter four explores Dickens’ inheritance from Charles Lamb and his acting in sentimental plays by Bulwer Lytton and Wilkie Collins. Chapter five analyses three early novels, including ‘Nicholas Nickleby’, revealing the extremism of post-Romantic sentimentalism. In chapter six, three later novels including ‘Dombey and Son’ are reread in terms of Dickens’ changing use of sentimentalist rhetoric to achieve remarkably subversive effects. The final chapter then looks at other examples of nineteenth-century sentimental writing, and at the ‘afterlife’ of the mode in the past two centuries.
Readership:
This book will benefit academic specialists and students of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, Victorian studies and cultural studies.
Author Information
Valerie Purton is Reader in Victorian Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. She has received two MA degrees, from the University of Cambridge and University of Alberta, Canada, and studied for her PhD at the University of East Anglia, where she wrote her dissertation on Dickens and the sentimental tradition. She has been an associate lecturer at the Open University and at the University of East Anglia. She is the organiser of a bicentennial conference in Cambridge on Dickens’ Legacy and has written many reviews and articles on Dickens. She edits the ‘Tennyson Research Bulletin’ and has co-authored two books on Tennyson.
Table of Contents
Introduction; Chapter 1: Dickens and the Sentimentalist Tradition; Chapter 2: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in the 18C Novel: Fielding, Richardson and Sterne; Chapter 3: Sentimentalism and its Discontents in 18C Drama: Goldsmith and Sheridan; Chapter 4: Dickens and 19C Drama; Chapter 5: The Early Novels; Chapter 6: The Later Novels; Conclusion: The Afterlife of Sentimentalism
