Feeling Dickensian feeling

‘Feeling Dickensian feeling' asks why modern literary criticism, notably that inflected by new historicism, is so intent on stripping sentimentalism of its sentimental feeling.  The essay suggests that the reader encounters experiential problems when feelings are separated from critical practice and also outlines the specific issues at stake when critics translate immaterial subjects, like feeling or belief, into external, material events. Thus Dickensian sentiment is often critically analysed for its historical content despite the emotional pleasure many readers purport to enjoy in experiencing its expression. I suggest that Dickens's ‘A Christmas Carol' (1842) embodies some of these tensions by presenting Ebenezer Scrooge as a cautionary figure who begins by quantifying the world and ends by feeling it. I also build on modernity's aversion to feeling through the work of Wendy Wheeler and Teresa Brennan to forward a model of reading for feeling. This model, I argue, works through a sense-based form of close reading that privileges specificity and particularity in the reading process, both of words and sentences but also of readers' responses.

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Illustration from 'The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow with numerous illustrations.' Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company; James R. Osgood and Company, 1880. p. 95.

‘Thousands of throbbing hearts'

Sentimentality and community in popular Victorian poetry: Longfellow's Evangeline and Tennyson's Enoch Arden .

Kirstie Blair

This article explores the function of sentimentality in popular nineteenth-century narrative poetry by focusing on Tennyson's Enoch Arden and Longfellow's Evangeline , two poems that have suffered relative critical neglect due to their status as sentimental verse. It argues that both texts, in their stories of exile, alienation and eventual recuperation, set up their hero and heroine as role-models for ways of feeling and use them to examine the possibility of using personal feeling as a conduit for communal sentiment. While both poems deploy the standard tropes of Victorian sentimentality, the ambiguous conclusions of Enoch Arden and Evangeline , I argue, call into question the clichés of sentimental discourse. The fates of Enoch and of Evangeline offer, to some extent, a darker vision of the potential for sentimental responses to an individual's suffering to create feeling communities either within or without the poem.

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George Cruikshank, Illustration for Oliver Twist

"Don't be so melodramatic!" Dickens and the affective mode

Sally Ledger

Beginning with Martin Meisel's account of theatrical and fictional tableaux as 'effects', this essay explores Dickens's staging of sentimental affect both in his performed readings of his fiction and in the works of fiction themselves. Initially focusing on a private reading of The Chimes in 1843, captured in an illustration by Daniel Maclise, and at which a number of his friends and colleagues openly wept, the essay moves on to give an account of Dickens's instrumental manipulation of sentimental affect in scenes from Oliver Twist, 'A Christmas Carol' and Bleak House.  The essay argues, firstly, that in carefully staging self-reflexive sentimental tableaux, Dickens creates a species of 'alienation effect' that reinforces the affective power of the scenes. Secondly it contends that what Dickens was aiming for was less a representational realism that a realism of affect; and thirdly that he simultaneously engaged with and interroged  the melodramatic mode in his later works of fiction leading, in Bleak House, to a cross-class account of women's oppression.

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Richard Doyle, Chirp the Second, 1843, Wood engraving for Dickens's The Cricket on the Hearth

Sentiment and Vision in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth

Heather Tilley

This essay explores the ways in which sentimentality is manifested through the visible, and through associative functions of the eye, in two of Dickens's Christmas books of the 1840s. I situate the relationship between vision and sentiment within discourses from eighteenth-century moral philosophy, as Adam Smith's figure of the “Impartial Spectator” (of central importance to the development of ideas around sympathy) is constructed mainly through the visual. I focus on two of the Christmas Books as they offer an interesting local study to test these ideas, coming at a critical juncture within the development of Dickens's own writing style, and also at an important historical moment within an investigation into Victorian sentimentality.

Within Dickens's writing, sentimentality is typically associated with the exaggerated emotional portrayal of pathetic scenes (particularly the deaths of children), designed to elicit emotional responses from the reader. However, behind the hyperbole rests a concern with the self's need to take social, ethical and moral care of others, and the role of literature and art in tutoring the reader's emotional response, with the eye playing a crucial role in this act. I further explore the way in which Dickens's interest in blindness both reinforces, and points to certain disturbances, in his sentimental vision.

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Emily Farmer (1826-1905), In Doubt , 1881, watercolour, 1905, Victorian and Albert Museum.

Portrait of Samuel Johnson

From Sentiment to Sentimentality: A Nineteenth Century lexicographical Search

Marie Banfield

The brief account of the lexicographical history of the word ‘sentiment' in the nineteenth century, and the table of definitions which follows it, grew from my increasing sense of the shifting and ambivalent nature of the term in the literature of the period, despite the resonance and the proverbial solidity of phrases such as ‘Victorian sentiment' and ‘Victorian sentimentality'. The table is self explanatory, representing the findings of a search, among a wide range of nineteenth-century dictionaries over the period, for the changing meanings accrued by the word ‘sentiment' over time, its extensions and its modifications. The nineteenth-century lexicographical history of the word ‘sentiment' has its chief roots in the Eighteenth-century enlightenment, with definitions from Samuel Johnson and quotations from John Locke, chiefly based on intellect and reason. The nineteenth-century generated a number of derivatives of the word over a period of time to express altered modes of feeling, thought and moral concern. The history of the word ‘sentiment' offers a psychological as well as a linguistic narrative.

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Frederick Walker (1840-1875), Autumn , 1865, watercolour, Victorian and Albert Museum

Francis Chantrey, The Sleeping Children, 1817, marble sculpture, Litchfield Cathedral

Notes on Contributors

Print by Marcus Ward & Company, London, 1867

Linking to the nineteenth century

We've trawled the web and found some of the best, most interesting and downright weird materials from and about the long nineteenth century. In each issue we will be adding to our archive of links. Check them out here...