At the symbolic centre of every Dickens novel is the roaring fire of a domestic hearth. Readers of Dickens frequently related clustering in familial groups around a fireplace, sharing in the fire’s uncertain pools of light and warmth while they read the text aloud. And within the texts themselves, the Dickens fireside has been seen as an idyllic space of conflict resolution: as Alexander Welsh has put it, “if the problem that besets” Dickens “can be called the city, his answer can be named the hearth.” This essay seeks to remember the materiality of the fireside alongside its more symbolic evocations. Comparing Dickens’s representation of the coal fuelling the fires of A Christmas Carol (1843) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), written over twenty years later, and taking in several short fictions published in Household Words in the intervening decade, it shows that Dickens often based plots of fictional transformation on the fantastic metamorphoses embodied in the lump of coal itself. While there was something exuberant about this change in the 1840s and 1850s, when Britain’s plentiful coal supplies were frequently imagined as tokens of a divine plan favourable to British industrial and imperial expansion, the darkening mood of Dickens’s late fiction chimed with contemporary fears about the waste and depletion of resources and the increasing competitiveness of the global markets. Most importantly, however, throughout his career the material dimension of coal offered Dickens both narrative possibility, and representational trouble. So important was it to his social vision that he often overlooked the cost of coal in his desire to keep his poorest characters warm, and in the 1860s he repeatedly ridiculed the national panic that Britain’s coal reserves might run out. Thinking about Dickens’s firesides as both symbolic and material spaces, fuelled by the coal whose history was of such fascination to the readers of Household Words, we see that the hearth was not only Dickens’s all-solving “answer” to the problems of the “city.” It was a space in which many of his most central concerns would sit in unequal, and unresolved, tension
Victorian geology was 'a ubiquitous and emblematic science', and it was characterised perhaps more than any other Victorian science by its vibrant material culture. 1 Though literary criticism has almost exclusively focused on nineteenth-century geology's production of 'narratives' of the history of the earth (in the shape of 'progression', 'uniformitarianism', 'catastrophism' and 'evolution', for example), in fact historians of science have demonstrated that the 'central business' of the science for its elite practitioners was not the formulation of laws of change or causation, but stratigraphy, the determination of the order and structure of the layers of rocks and fossils beneath the earth's surface. 2 This project was rooted in the material objects of the science, often guided by the need to accurately predict the locations of lucrative coal-bearing and other mineral-rich sections of the strata. Furthermore, not only did the Geological Survey (f. 1835) direct important attention and resources to the practices of surveying and mapping, but in the early-to-mid-nineteenth-century the science was also integrally associated with palaeontology, and with the building of museums, collections, and exhibitions. It was in its focus on the material structure of the earth, rather than on its story, that geologists most radically reconfigured the Victorians' apprehension of their position within time and space.Given the intimate interrelationship between the history of evolutionary thought and the history of geology, it is perhaps unsurprising that literary critics have often considered geology using tools of analysis largely drawn from such influential studies of evolutionary biology and the novel as Gillian Beer's Darwin's Plots (1983) and George Levine's Darwin and the Novelists (1988). Beer and Levine's considerations of the ways in which literary narratives may have reflected, or drawn upon, or extended, or disconfirmed the shapes and structures of the world described by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859), while appropriate to the study of evolutionary science, occludes many of the key differences between geology and evolutionary biology in this period. While Levine, Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, Jonathan Smith, and a host of other critics focus on the narratives of earth history geology may have contributed to
DESPITE THE WELL-ESTABLISHED CONNECTIONSbetween Dickens's novels and Victorian popular entertainment, and between Victorian show business and the display and dissemination of science, critics have not yet explored the possible links between scientific shows and Dickens's fiction. Work on Dickens and science has proliferated since George Levine's work inDarwin and the Novelists, but its central problem has been the fact that, as Francis O’Gorman described it, Dickens's scientific reading was “nugatory” (252). The most well-represented branch of science on his bookshelves was natural history; in even this, Dickens displayed only the “intelligent interest that would be expected of a man of the world” (Hill 203). Levine's influential “one culture” model surmounted the problem by pointing out the similar structural patterns implicit in the worlds described by Dickens and Darwin, but in an attempt to develop more direct links between Dickens's work and evolutionary science, almost all subsequent studies have focused on Dickens's 1860s novels, written after the publication of theOrigin of Species(1859) (Morris 179–93; Fulweiler 50–74; Morgentaler 707–21). There has not been a study that explores Dickens's acquaintance with natural history at different points in his career, or through the visual and material cultures with which he was so familiar.
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