Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens (PDF)

JOHN GORDON is Professor of English at Connecticut College, USA.

"The reader of this excellent study of Dickens's Oliver Twist, Dombey and Son, and Bleak House quickly becomes

enmeshed in Gordon's impassioned inquiries. Exhilarating reads, these serious novels provide inexhaustible material

for critical analyses. Drawing on the work of such scholars as J. Hillis Miller, Terry Castle, and Michel Slater (author

of the magisterial Charles Dickens, CH, Apr'10, 47-4288), Gordon (Connecticut College) sheds light on Dickens's

magical force. Among the topics he examines are pedophilia, anti-Semitism, industrialism, capitalism, and liminal

experiences. Dickens's complex narrative style includes a variety of tropes - melodrama, fairy tale, the gothic. The

three novels depict child sacrifice, corrupt patriarchs, and social disharmony. Oliver Twist is preoccupied by sadism

and infanticide, horrors Dickens buffers with Oliver's good fortune and hypnagogic trances. Dombey and Bleak

House move beyond that fairy-tale world, dealing with contemporaneous social institutions and issues (railroads,

capitalism, social leadership). In the complex Bleak House, women's trials constitute a special subset of issues as

women seek satisfaction in an elusive motherhood; the narrative intertwines a retrospective, wounded female voice

with a dominating masculine presence. Thus the reader of the novelist's "psychological pleasure palace" is challenged

by alternative perceptions. Gordon's discussion of all this makes for an excellent book." - Choice

"With the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth imminent, we can expect a flood of books on Charles Dickens. I suspect, however, that few of them will display as much critical intelligence as Sensation and Sublimation in Charles Dickens, and I doubt that any will match the positively Dickensian energy, wit, and gusto that Gordon brings to his subject." - Austin Briggs, Tompkins Professor of English