“AWFUL UNKNOWN QUANTITIES”: ADDRESSING THE READERS INHARD TIMES

Abstract

Charles Dickens was lionized in the early 1850s for his political powers as a novelist, journalist, and reformer. A December 1850 review of David Copperfield in Fraser's Magazine affirmed that the so-called “Boz” has done more, we verily believe, for the promotion of peace and goodwill between man and man, class and class, nation and nation, than all the congresses under the sun . . . . Boz, and men like Boz, are the true humanizers, and therefore the true pacificators, of the world. They sweep away the prejusdices of class and caste, and disclose the common ground of humanity which lies beneath factitious social and national systems. Such tributes to his political powers must have been gratifying to a writer who had begun his career as a parliamentary reporter. They proclaimed the power of the writer in an age of print, bearing out Thomas Carlyle's sense that “Printing . . . is equivalent to Democracy . . . . Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making.” Fraser's elaborated on this idea by linking Dickens's uncanny ability to “introduce” characters to one another to his ability to “introduce” such characters to readers of different ranks. “Men like Boz,” the reviewer explained, “introduce the peasantry to the peerage” and “the grinder at the mill to the millionaire who owns the grist” (700).