Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• GURNEY, PETER

Titel

The Age of Veneer: Charles Dickens and the antinomies of Victorian consumer culture

Ist Teil von

• Dickens quarterly, 2015-09, Vol.32 (3), p.229-246

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2015

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• George Orwell once noted in a perceptive essay how Dickens's work was vitally concerned with understanding "a city of consumers," and that he observed the social world primarily "from the consumer-angle [...] the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above all, food" (115, 118). [...]Dickens's writing was itself imbricated within a growing consumer culture. [...]immoral practices are not merely unfortunate aspects of an otherwise beneficial system that can easily be reformed but are rather symptoms of a much wider pathology - a diseased consumer culture that situates the insatiable consumption of material goods at the center of personal as well as social and economic life. [...]at the very center of this city of extremes, surrounded by concentric circles of obscurity, lies the hellish "rusty-black" financial center of global capitalism. According to the OED, Carlyle was among the first to use the term in Past and Present (1843): "In whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms, Dilettantisms [...] shall disappear!" 5 Note Patten and Miller 146-7.