Module description
Charles Dickens is a writer indelibly associated with place, and above all with the sights, sounds and social debates of nineteenth-century London. His status as a laureate of London life is complicated, however, by his restless journeys across Britain, Europe and America and his imaginative engagement with geographies of empire and globalization. This module will explore the relationship between local attachment and global movement across Dickens’s fiction, travel writing and journalism. Particular attention will be paid to Dickens’s inheritance from London’s political and theatrical traditions, his narratives of high and low life in the city, and his representation of the rapidly modernizing metropolis as a ‘world city’. We will combine these topics with a focus on Dickens’s role in mediating places from Paris to India to Australasia for Victorian audiences, as well as his creation of a new mode of international celebrity. In doing so, we will examine the literary innovations used to capture place, from the journalistic sketch to proto-cinematic modes of narration. We will also draw on approaches from transnational history, postcolonial theory, distant reading and mobility studies to explore questions of place, race, travel and identity in Dickens’s writing.
Assessment details
4000 word essay
Educational aims & objectives
Students will aim to critique the ways in which Dickens and his contemporaries responded to social, political and scientific developments in the period, while also grappling with the diverse transnational reception of his texts. In so doing, we will explore nineteenth-century London as both a ‘centre of empire’ and a cosmopolitan European capital, uncovering the global networks behind local microhistories. With the aid of walking tours, lectures, and independent research we will also uncover the material and non-material traces of nineteenth-century London in modern institutions and the surrounding area. By focusing on an important single author in deep context, this module seeks to foster advanced research skills and critical thinking. Students will be encouraged to pursue their own areas of interest within this framework. Assessment tasks will offer students a glimpse of the kinds of original research activities that will feed into postgraduate study and future careers.
Learning outcomes
- Gain a broad understanding of the culture and society of nineteenth–century Britain.
- Trace the ways in which broader trends in intellectual and cultural history influenced the production and consumption of literature.
- Develop the critical skills to independently interpret ‘literary’ texts in a comparative manner, alongside non-literary texts, music, visual artworks and material artefacts.
- The ability to interpret the contemporary city in the context of its literary and political history.
- Gain an appreciation of the place of ‘English’ literature within a global print culture from the nineteenth century to the present.
- Develop advanced research skills and gain a familiarity with archival sources, electronic databases on nineteenth-century literature and culture.
Teaching pattern
2 hour seminar, weekly
Suggested reading list
Indicative Reading List (subject to change)
Oliver Twist
American Notes for General Circulation
A Tale of Two Cities
Great Expectations
Our Mutual Friend
All other core reading supplied via KEATS