Thesis (M. A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 103-108). Also available via the World Wide Web.

This thesis discusses the relationship between money and character in the novels of Charles Dickens, concentrating mainly on the later novels, from Dombey & Son onwards. Money is extremely important in Dickens's social criticism, and he is always conscious of money-related motives in his conception of character. However, despite its importance and omnipresence, money ought not to be elevated into the key explanatory principle in Dickens's thought. Dickens has been valued for different qualities over the years. Many who value him as an entertainer with a powerful poetic imagination tend to undervalue his social criticism and moralising, and to treat those aspects as non-essential or as belonging to a different side of his life and work. On the other hand those who value him as social and moral critic have combined this with exaggerated claims of thematic coherence. This thesis suggests that we can dispense with such claims while still regarding Dickens's novels as serious contributions to the moral and social debates of his day. A close consideration will be given to most of the later novels, with the intention of placing the money themes alongside other themes, so as to emphasise the many-sidedness of Dickens's social and moral criticism. Other themes explored in the thesis include marriage and the home, and hypocrisy and self-deception. The thesis seeks to do justice to Dickens's thorough-going ambivalence towards money, and to his capacity for revisiting characters and themes from one work to another. The bias of the thesis is towards the personal and individual, but money is inevitably a social topic. Much consideration is therefore given to Dickens's fictional and non- fictional responses to contemporary social problems and attitudes, and also to material not written by Dickens but published by him in Household Words and All the Year Round.

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University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of English

Through an analysis of the reception of Charles Dickens’ unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood this thesis establishes the centrality of the figure of the author as the perceived sanction for the completed text. Through an initial analysis of completed narrative, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories, it shows that the ending is of particular importance as the point at which the reader can look back over the whole and confirm or disconfirm the provisional interpretations which have been made during the reading. It only makes sense to talk of unfinished texts or unfinished narratives in the context of a creative authority, generally identified as the author. An analysis of the reception of unfinished serial narratives of the late Victorian period, specifically the unfinished works of William M. Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson, confirms the centrality of the figure of the author in attempts to reconstruct the missing ending. The main body of the thesis provides a period-based analysis of Droodiana, the completions of and speculations about Dickens’ unfinished novel. In the analysis of the strategies employed to justify completions, and the responses to these, it establishes not only that the attempts to take on the authorial authority are perceived as sacrilegious, but that the perception of the completion-writers’ lack of the authority to posit an ending affects whether completions are read as able to complete the story: the willingness to submit to the ending (and revise provisional readings in light of it) is dependent on the perception of the authorial authority of the writer. The analysis shows that while the author-function develops over time, there is some continuity from the late Victorian period towards the present. The analysis of Droodian speculations trace their origin and development through a series of periods, showing that the variety of plots proposed masks a common concern with arriving at Dickens’ intended plot: a desire to identify the creative intention with the plot that would provide the most satisfying ending produces an increased variety over time.

This thesis endeavors to show how Charles Dickens revealed himself and his life in his works.

Photocopy of typescript. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

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Zugl.: Jena, Univ., Diss., 2009

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-225). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.