Abstract
This final chapter of Part I — a detailed analysis of a single, canonical work of nineteenth-century fiction and its scholarly reception —engages with Charles Dickens, the Imperial and childhood. Over the past thirty years, this triad has generated considerable critical interest, evidenced recently, for example, by a collection of essays: Dickens and the Children of Empire.1 My concern is with a work that is not addressed by any of the contributors to this text: The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens’s last, unfinished novel of divided consciousness has certainly been read in terms of the Imperial, with, for example, David Faulkner exploring the relationship between Muscular Christianity and Colonial practice within the novel, Hyungji Park comparing its staging of Empire to a contemporary culture of exhibition, Miriam O’Kane Mara reading it as a late critique of colonial consumerism, and Allan Lloyd Smith arguing that the work grants access to repressed Victorian investments in racial difference. Readings centred on the child are less common.2 Indeed, there is no discussion of the child in any of the accounts listed above, and Amberyl Malkovich makes no mention of Drood in her recent Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child: Romanticizing and Socializing the Imperfect Child.3
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Notes
W. S. Jacobson (ed.) (2000) Dickens and the Children of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave).
All subsequent references to Drood. A. L. Smith (1992) ‘The Phantoms of Drood and Rebecca: The Uncanny Reencountered through Abraham and Torek’s “Cryptonymy”’, Poetics Today, 13/2, 285–308;
D. Faulkner (1994) ‘The Confidence Man: Empire and the Deconstruction of Muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in D. E. Hall (ed.) Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 175–93;
H. Park (2002) ‘“Going to Wake up Egypt”: Exhibiting Empire in “Edwin Drood”’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30/2, 529–50;
M. M. O’Kane, (2003) ‘Sucking the Empire Dry: Colonial Critique in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, Dickens Studies Annual, 32, 233–46.
For Drood as Imperial, see also, for example, E. K. Sedgwick (1985) Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press) as discussed at length in this chapter;
H. Furneux (2009) Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
J. S. DeWind (1993) ‘The Empire as Metaphor: England and the East in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, in J. Maynard and A. A. Munich (eds.) Victorian Literature and Culture (New York, AMS), pp. 169–89.
A. Malkovich (2013) Charles Dickens and the Victorian Child: Romanticizing and Socializing the Imperfect Child (Children’s Literature and Culture) (New York: Routledge).
L. Peters (2000) Orphan Texts: Victorian Orphans, Culture and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press), reprinted in L. Peters (2012) (ed.) Dickens and Childhood (Farnham: Ashgate).
Dickens died without completing the novel. Notions of return in Drood are bound up with its status as unfinished text. See, for example, G. Joseph (1996) ‘Who Cares Who Killed Edwin Drood? or, on the Whole, I’d Rather be in Philadelphia’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 51, 161–75. For a wide ranging and rigorous reading of such unfinished return, see Royle, The Uncanny.
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© 2014 Neil Cocks
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Cocks, N. (2014). The Child and the Thing. In: The Peripheral Child in Nineteenth Century Literature and its Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452450_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137452450_5
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