6 - The Dickens Centenary and After (1970–1979)

Summary

BY THE TIME DICKENS had been dead a hundred years, it was possible for Philip Hobsbaum to write without equivocation that “The reputation of Charles Dickens is in no danger” (1). In fact, the centenary of Dickens's death was celebrated with public ceremonies, seminars, and innumerable publications. The tributes actually began a year early and continued for three years. In the summer of 1969, the editors of Studies in the Novel brought out a special issue on Dickens, collecting critical commentary from some of the current luminaries in Dickens studies and a few newer voices. The first of a number of essay collections, E. W. F. Tomlin's Charles Dickens 1812–1870: A Centennial Volume (1969) includes work by E. D. H. Johnson, Emlyn Williams, Ivor Brown, Harry Stone, and the novelist J. B. Priestley. Tomlin argues in an essay titled “Dickens's Reputation: A Reassessment” that, with the notable exception of Edmund Wilson, before 1950 the reading public were the real heroes of Dickens studies, keeping alive an interest in Dickens when critics found him unworthy of serious attention. Tomlin is probably correct in claiming that, at the moment of this centenary, “Dickens now enjoys a reputation among critics [Tomlin's emphasis] as an accomplished and conscious artist, far higher than ever before” (259). But Tomlin soars to heights of adulation often reserved for Shakespeare when he proclaims that “we may be confident that whatever men may be reading in another century, they will be reading Dickens” (263).