Halle, Phil. diss. v. 5. Jan. 1912, Ref. Deutschbein.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-296). Also available in print.

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 307-315).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Dept. of Comparative Literature, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

This paper examined how Esther Summerson, Dickens’s ideal good mother, can be understood as a woman who has maternal agency and identity both as a character and as a narrator, and how she contrasts with other maternal characters in the novel, both major and minor. While more transgressive mothers, such as Lady Dedlock, Mrs. Jellyby and even Krook’s cat, are doomed to death, ineffectiveness and madness, Esther moves from a frozen, “unsexualized” state into a space of life and sexual possibility. In addition, Esther has agency and identity as a narrator since she shares the narration with a third-person male narrator. Esther becomes the one who speaks rather than the one who is spoken of, and her maternal, nurturing voice provides a balm for the often harsh, judgmental voice of the male narrator. As the narrator’s patriarchal voice dies away at the end, it is Esther’s maternal voice that survives.

The focus of this study is not so much the city in Dickens' novels, but man in the city, and particularly man in Victorian London - a city given over to the world of commerce. The conditions resulting from the victory of businessmen and the middle classes are central concerns in the later novels, and are mirrored in the city landscape: Dickens knows that it is in the industrial cities, and not in the countryside, that the social problems of his age must be resolved. Through their insistence that money can do everything, the new powers of the city turn London into an ultimately demonic world, characterized by isolation, confusion, and sterility; shaped into prisons, labyrinths, and wastelands. As the city expands through economic growth, it becomes a monster, threatening its inhabitants with a fearful 'otherness'. The first chapter of the study deals with the fact of change in Victorian London, a change defined by the victory of middle-class and free-enterprise 'Progress'. The succeeding five chapters describe the various ways in which Dickens' urban men attempt to evade the new facts of their environment: through ignorance and isolation, through the misuse of language, through the repression of sexuality and emotion, through the substitution of cash for all human relationships, and, finally, for the middle-classes, through physical escape into Suburbia. Dickens shows, however, that escape is futile: men can only defeat the demonic city by confronting it, and by rejecting (not protecting) its dehumanizing values. The final chapters offer an examination of the demonic and apocalyptic archetypes that structure Dickens' city and attempt to show that, in the later novels, it is necessary to pass through the demonic gulf in order to be redeemed into a happier vision of city life. The possibility of such a victory for urban men - if only on a limited scale, by a small number of characters - is testified to by the humour throughout the novels, and by the happy resolutions at the end. London as the great commercial city is most extensively treated in Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little,Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and these are the novels round which most of the study is centred. Although in Hard Times Dickens focuses specifically on the new industrial city, Coketown is only partially like London: everything is on a much smaller - almost on an intimate - scale, and it lacks the compensating 'big city' pleasures that make life in London a more complex issue than merely Man versus Progress. For these reasons, Hard Times is not dealt with as a central text. By their extensive focus on life outside London, Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield are also limited in their applications' to this particular study. In both these novels, the hero's struggle for happiness and self-knowledge is determined only to a small degree by the city itself. The early city worlds of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist are used for two purposes. They point to some of the continuing concerns of Dickens' art, and they serve as a contrast to the later experiences of urban life: Pickwick Papers, through its ability to assimilate even the Fleet into a joyous vision of the world; and Oliver Twist, through its opposing insistence on a totally evil city. In the later novels, Dickens mediates between the two extremes: London lies somewhere between Eden and Hell. The study is structured along thematic lines, rather than through a series of self-contained essays on individual novels. In its organization, therefore, it must sometimes sacrifice the sense of each novel as an autonomous :word-world with its own unique logic, in order to suggest the coherence within Dickens' works as a whole. The order of development mimics, in a sense, the Dickensian response to the city: it moves cumulatively and inevitably from the discussion of disintegration and isolation of the first chapters towards a vision of London as the demonic city in Chapter VII, and it is only at the end, in the concluding section, that it can move out of the hellish gulf into the world of comedy. For Dickens too, the comic redemption is essential and cannot be left out, but in relationship to the totality of the city, it takes up only a fraction of the whole. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

This thesis attempts to redress the drought of work on Dickens on comedy, which is surprising considering how often Dickens is thought of as a comic writer. The thesis uses Dickens to demonstrate problems with and resistance to existing theorizations of laughter, and attempts to develop a new way of thinking about laughter through Dickens. The thesis begins with a theoretical section, which is a discussion of existing discussions of laughter followed by an attempt to develop a new way of thinking about laughter by making use Alain Badiou’s concept of the ‘event.’ The thesis then moves to Section Two, in which these ideas are discussed alongside Dickens’s novels. Chapter Four attempts to show in a general way how Dickens and these discussions of laughter belong together, and how a certain moment in the nineteenth century that Dickens was a unique part of shows that new ways of discussing laughter are needed. Chapter Five argues that laughter in Dickens is not natural or spontaneous but part of constructing an idea of natural spontaneity. Pickwick Papers, it is argued, is the novel of retroactive causes, showing how laughter can create ideas of ‘nature’ which then appear to explain social behaviour such as laughter itself. Chapter Six tackles the relationship between laughter and anxiety. It argues that laughter creates order by ‘dealing’ with anxiety, but that this order it produces is profoundly unstable and has new anxieties. Barnaby Rudge is the novel which shows this in its particular historical context. The final chapter argues that Dickens’s writing can be called ‘comic’ in the terms that have been established throughout the thesis. Discussing Great Expectations, it argues that laughter is a plotting force that creates narratives and structures. Finally, the conclusion discusses changes that may have happened to laughter in the nineteenth century and what it means to find ourselves laughing at Dickens’s texts today.

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