Professor John Bowen (University of York) speaks on ‘Dickens’s Theatres of Cruelty’ at Royal Holloway’s Picture Gallery.
…a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance with two figures on it, floated on the Thames…as an autumn evening was closing in.
Join us on an autumn evening for a festive lecture on the filth and cruelties of Dickens’s last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend.
Royal Holloway’s Centre for Victorian Studies is delighted to host Professor John Bowen on the 1st of December 2022. The lecture will be held in our historic Picture Gallery and will be followed by a drinks reception. This will be our first Picture Gallery event in quite some time and we are so excited by the opportunity to come together as a research community again. We invite all Dickens/Nineteenth-Century enthusiasts and students and academics of all career stages to join us for what promises to be a fantastic event. Everyone is very welcome!
Tickets are free but please do sign up so that we have have a rough idea of numbers. If you have any questions please email anya.eastman@rhul.ac.uk (CVS Co-Director).
About the Lecture: ‘Dickens’s Theatures of Cruelty’
Algernon Swinburne, like many others, saw Dickens as an author of cleanliness and sanity, claiming that the ‘imagination or the genius of Dickens … never condescended or aspired to wallow in metaphysics or in filth’. But Our Mutual Friend positively incites its readers to wallow in metaphysics and filth, although few critical accounts have fully registered the derangement wrought by its embedded cruelties, obsessions and dispossessions to our understanding of Dickens’s work and the nineteenth century novel more generally. This paper is about the ways in which Our Mutual Friend is permeated by – and intermittently enacts – strange theatres of cruelty, told through a poetics of articulation and exhaustion whose breath and voices are characteristically derisive, prompted or dead. As Gilles Deleuze has argued, ‘No one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens’.
About the Speaker
John Bowen is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of York and a Fellow of the English Association. He has served as President of the Dickens Fellowship and of the Dickens Society and as Co-Director of the University of California Dickens Project. His publications include Other Dickens: Pickwick to Chuzzlewit, Palgrave Advances in Charles Dickens Studies (co-edited with Robert L. Patten) and editions of novels by Dickens and Trollope for Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics. He is currently editing Bleak House for Norton and writing Reading Charles Dickens for CUP.
The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates 