In 1888, an Orthodox English-language newspaper, the Jewish Standard, published an article series, "Jews in Fiction," that looked critically at Jewish characters in English literature. The series began with Sir Walter Scott's Isaac of York, then featured Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. After critiquing Fagin and Riah, the April 20th column conjectured what it might look like for Charles Dickens to use his "magician's wand" to write a more nuanced treatment of everyday Jewish life: How he would have reveled in the description of the ostentation, the generosity, the kindliness, the harshness, the thousand and one contradictions to be found in our fellow-Jews and Jewesses. [How he would have treated]… Mr. and Mrs. Z-, with all their children-how they went to synagogue Saturday morning gorgeously attired....Then Dickens would describe how the family go home to luncheon, a better luncheon most likely than on weekdays, because paterfamilias is at home. How our author would revel over the fried fish and various orthodox dainties. (3) Envisioning Jewish life through the lens of an outside observer, the columnist's flight of fancy focuses more on the imagined pleasure Dickens would take in the spectacle, how he would "revel" in the scene, than on the interior lives of the Jewish characters. The writer then exclaims, "Shade of Dickens! would that your mantle might descend on my shoulders, that I might worthily describe all this." The irony is, of course, that the writer has just described this scene, but as the imagined Dickens. This passage from the Jewish Standard dramatizes the pressure of external Jewish stereotypes on the self-conception of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish community. In the very act of portraying this community, the columnist negates the act by calling upon Dickens to make the anonymous columnist a
Newspapers are constantly lying in the worlds of Victorian novels, from the false report of John Harmon’s death in Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865) to allegations of extramarital affairs in Phineas Finn (1867-1868). Yet characters continue to believe what they read in the newspaper, assuming that news must be recent, relevant, and true. Victorian novels thus explore the contradictory logic of news: claims to journalistic reality sit uneasily alongside unrepresentative, malicious, or even false news. This book argues that nineteenth-century novels analysed the formal and social workings of news through a shifting series of metaphors, analogies, and plots. By incorporating newspapers and news discourse into their narratives, Victorian novels experimented with the ways that generic and formal qualities might reshape communal and national imaginings. This book shows that novelists often responded to newspapers by reworking well-known events covered by Victorian newspapers in their fictions. Each chapter addresses a different narrative modality and its relationship to the news: Charles Dickens interrogates the distinctions between fictional and journalistic storytelling, while Anthony Trollope explores novelistic bildung in serial form; the sensation novels of Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon locate melodrama in realist discourses, whereas Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill represents a hybrid minority experience. At the core of these metaphors and narrative forms is a theorisation of the newspaper’s influence on society.
This paper examines utopian/dystopian time and serial form in several late-nineteenth-century proto-dystopian novels, including Anthony Trollope's The Fixed Period, James De Mille's A Strange Manuscript in a Copper Cylinder, and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Through mingling the futuristic orientation of utopias and the presentist cause-and-effect experience of serial form, late nineteenth-century dystopias do not set these other worlds in the distant future; rather, they ask readers to see signs of their mortality in the everyday. In doing so, these paradoxical temporalities combine to highlight the finiteness of late-Victorian institutions in the face of more expansive depictions experience.
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