1 - The Dickens Phenomenon (1836–1870)

Summary

THE RECEPTION OF DICKENS'S WORK by his contemporaries has been the subject of several studies, the most significant among them George Ford's Dickens and His Readers (1955). Ford's influential and oftquoted book has been supplemented by Philip Collins in his introduction to Dickens: The Critical Heritage (1971) and Kathryn Chittick in The Critical Reception of Charles Dickens 1833–1841 (1989). As a consequence, the present brief summary is not intended to replace earlier scholarship, but instead to review trends in criticism that provide necessary background for understanding what happened later in Dickens studies.

As Chittick observes in her analysis of Dickens's earliest works, as soon as his first sketches started appearing, newspapers began to run brief notices and commentaries on their quality (47). Predictably, periodicals began carrying longer reviews of Dickens's work almost as soon as Sketches by Boz was in print. Dickens's initial reviewers were especially interested in characterization and verisimilitude, and not all of them were positive. The reviewer for the Examiner (1836) complained that Dickens relied too heavily on caricatures of Cockney figures, meliorating that criticism by remarking “this broad, common-place sort of thing is unworthy of the author” whose talents suggested he was capable of greater accomplishments (Chittick 61). George Hogarth, Dickens's future father-in-law, went even farther in putting forward the notion that Dickens was destined to be more than a jocular entertainer. Writing in the Morning Chronicle (1836), Hogarth cited “A Visit to Newgate” as an example of Dickens's powers as a social commentator (Chittick 61).