Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Buckmaster, Jonathan

Titel

Charles Dickens as an Agent of Change eds. by Joachim Frenk and Lena Steveker (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2019-12, Vol.36 (4), p.362-365

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• While this accords with the commercial popularity of urban melodrama, it also fits within the popular tradition of radicalism, which championed the resourcefulness of the working poor in confronting their travails. [...]Jo the crossing-sweeper is transformed from the novel's pathetic urchin into a feistier social commentator, akin to Sam Weller and The Artful Dodger. In Great Expectations, he shows how an agent of change must adopt the attributes of the artist: an imaginative capacity to perceive reality as it truly is, the capability to love, forgive, and accept the "eternal shape" of the past, and finally the ability to perceive the larger design within disjunction and chaos. [...]Dickens's later life was characterized by his struggle to reconcile his public reputation as the advocate of family life with his private decision to split from his wife Catherine.