Dickens and Romantic Psychology : The Self in Time in Nineteenth-Century Literature

Anna was already there. When Vronsky entered, she was still in the same dress as she had worn at the theatre. She was ## \* \* \* My offering to proceed thus at this stage of Dickens criticism, however, may well put a reader on guard. 'Surely there's enough of that sort of thing', one might say; 'surely John Carey's The Violent Effigy3 was right in castigating the endless search for significance in the novels, which is so alien to their real spirit?' Well, Carey's book has its own kind of reductiveness about Dickens, of which one manifestation is the failure to discriminate between helpful and redundant interpretation, and the consequent gross 'I was a blacksmith's boy but yesterday; 1 am -what shall 1 say 1 am -today?' Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introductory: Dickens, Romantic Psychology and ‘the Experience of Modernity’....Pages 1-33 The Ideal of Victorian Manliness in Dombey and Son: Radicalising Wordsworthian Psychology....Pages 34-79 Wordsworthian Psychology and Little Dorrit: the Unresolved Dialogue....Pages 80-122 Great Expectations: ‘Working Things Through’....Pages 123-155 Back Matter....Pages 156-177 This book is the first extensive study of Dickens's developing awareness of the ways in which 'the child is the father to the man, ' seen as a key to the novels. Readings of three of these are set in the context of a general response in nineteenth-century literature to a sensed crisis in moral authority, concomitant upon the nature of post-Romantic, post-bourgeois, Revolutionary experience.