Dickens and the Politics of the Family

The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality; yet any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Drawing on feminist and new historicist methodologies, Catherine Waters argues that Dickens' novels record a shift in notions of the family away from stress on the importance of lineage and blood toward a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family. Examination of the representation of the family in Dickens's novels. The fictional representation of the family has long been regarded as a Dickensian speciality. But while nineteenth-century reviewers praised Dickens as the pre-eminent novelist of the family, any close examination of his novels reveals a remarkable disjunction between his image as the quintessential celebrant of the hearth, and his interest in fractured families. Catherine Waters offers an explanation of this discrepancy through an examination of Dickens's representation of the family in relation to nineteenth-century constructions of class and gender. Drawing upon feminist and new historicist methodologies, and focusing upon the normalising function of middle-class domestic ideology, Waters concludes that Dickens's novels record a shift in notions of the family away from an earlier stress upon the importance of lineage and blood towards a new ideal of domesticity assumed to be the natural form of the family Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 8 Copyright......Page 9 Contents......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 11 Note on the texts......Page 12 1. Introduction: the making and breaking of the family......Page 14 2. Fractured families in the early novels: Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son......Page 41 3. Dickens, Christmas and the family......Page 71 4. Little Dorrit......Page 102 5. A Tale of Two Cities......Page 135 6. Great Expectations......Page 163 7. Our Mutual Friend......Page 188 Postscript......Page 216 Notes......Page 220 Select bibliography......Page 234 Index......Page 244 Writing from Paris in 1856, where he was attempting to assuage his chronic restlessness with travel, Dickens confided his marital unhappiness in a letter to John Forster.