Twisty

Apologies for the slightly chaotic start to today's class: in future we should be able to start on time at noon in that room (QA 135).

Today I talked a little about the historical and biographical contexts out of which Dickens wrote Oliver Twist; and touched on the cultural context a little too: Silver Fork novels and the Newgate Novel. We discussed Dickens's claims to realism in the book, and the contrary discursive pull away from realism and towards the sort of schematic expressive allegory associated with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (memorialised in the novel's original subtitle: the Parish-Boy's Progress) -- if you haven't read that last book, it's worth skimming through: Google Books have numerous editions for free, including this rather handsome mid-Victorian edition. I was trying to argue that Dickens's writing mediates a creative tension between being tied to reality and flying off into wish-fulfilment fantasy (between the formal enclosure of 'realist' writing and the formal disclosure of the fantastical). Then we talked a little about 'eyes' in the novel; in the focus on set-piece largescale spectacles, on audiences and surveillance -- Nancy's eyes appearing spectrally in the sky and terrifying Sikes, the eager eyes watching Fagin's last days -- and tried to suggest that this again had a formal, as well as a content-based, aspect. All these eyes are in a sense our eyes, eagerly reading and watching all these things that are more usually hidden and secret. I mentioned D A Miller's The Novel and the Police (1989), a Foucauldian reading of 'surveillance' and power in Dickens, Collins and Trollope, that tropes the developing form of the novel as a kind of panopticon.** The link to Miller's study, there, is to a google books edition that has a fair selection of the whole; it's also in the library. (Here's a JSTOR review of the study that sums up its argument).

If you've any problems, come see me or drop me a line -- or feel free to put them in the comments to this post, and I'll answer them here. Comments or observations are also welcome. Otherwise check the blog for more later this week.

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**What's a pantopticon? Originally it was a special design of prison at Millbank: see this wikipedia article. It's a word that crops up a lot in more recent literary criticism, especially of the nineteenth-century, because the idea behind the prison was isolated by Foucault in his important study Discipline and Punish (1975) as emblematic of the way bourgeois culture places surveillance at the heart of policing its increasingly carcereal society. And if you don't know what carcereal means ... google it.