Abstract:
My thesis examines why members of Charles Dickens’s domestic circle recur as characters in neo-Victorian biofiction published between 1990 and 2010. Following the postmodern foregrounding of the marginalised figures of history, biofiction of this kind rewrites – and “re-rights” – biographical materials in order to enable Victorian figures to “live” again, and speak their own imagined testimony, in accordance with the priorities of today. Though most of the Hogarth/Dickens circle remain silent, or silenced, in the historical record, those who have been reprised as fictional characters include Dickens’s wife, Catherine; her sisters, Mary and Georgina Hogarth; his presumed mistress, Ellen Ternan; and his children. Recent novels that have sought to articulate their experiences include Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs (1997), Jeff Rackham’s The Rag and Bone Shop (2001), Audrey Thomas’s Tattycoram (2005), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress (2008), Matthew Pearl’s The Last Dickens (2009), Dan Simmons’s Drood (2009), and Anne-Marie Vukelic’s Far Above Rubies (2010). Yet although such novels foreground Dickens’s relatives and loveinterests in place of him, they paradoxically rely on the Victorian author for their meaningfulness. My thesis proposes, then, that neo-Victorian biofiction based on Dickens exhibits a twofold agenda: on the one hand, enabling the critique of biographical (mis)representations of the Hogarth/Dickens circle and, on the other hand, enhancing the experience of engaging with “Charles Dickens”, in and for the twenty-first century.
