"A Certain Shadow": Personified Abstractions and the Form of Household Words

Abstract

This article describes certain generic features of Household Words as evidence of an emergent epistemology of character, a way of knowing everything as divided and irreducible to systematic or numerical description. Dickens tentatively named this form of knowledge "a certain Shadow," but it should be called "character" because it is ascribed to the same generic tropes and associations that writers used to articulate psychologically complex fictional characters and the to describe the effects that such characters ought to have on readers. I analyze how Household Words personifies otherwise inanimate institutions and objects to fit this paradigm of character.

The nineteenth-century visiting mode and Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction

“…31 She might not indulge in the sledgehammer sarcasm of Hard Times, but she shares Dickens' suspicion of statistical thinking. 32 Her scattered references to statistics are ironical and subversive: hence the 'curious statistical fact' observed in 'Mr Harrison's Confessions' that 'five-sixths of our householders of a certain rank in Duncombe are women'. Enumeration unnerved, and averages were presented as alien and unhelpfully impersonal, invalidated by the social categorisation their arithmetic required.…”