The Cultures of Nineteenth-Century Writing

Dickens’s American Notes: Spittle, Newspapers, and America’s Typographic Response

Jessica DeSpain, Univ. of Iowa

jessica-despain@uiowa.edu

The satirical puns in Dickens’ title American Notes for General Circulation act as a jibe at the country that would willingly publish his travel narrative with no remuneration for the author. Dickens’s title relays the impression that he will have no control over the distribution or interpretation of his works, and it scathingly insinuates that America’s bastions of the low “culture of reprinting” will counterfeit his writing for their own profit. This interpretation is straightforward, yet, when critics attempt to extend Dickens’s fixation with America’s publishing injustices further into the Notes itself, they are foiled at every turn. The problems of a boisterous irresponsible press, an unethical publishing industry, and a public with no respect for privacy that preoccupy Dickens’s letters home to friends have been covered over in American Notes with descriptions of unhealthy spittle from missed spittoons much like the once pristine carpet of the Capitol building that Dickens visits. In this presentation, I argue that Dickens has not left issues of publishing to the wayside. Rather, he uses filth and despicable manners as metonyms for the culture’s wider inability to participate responsibly in the broad dispersion of culture which advancements in travel and printing technology made possible.

Cultural Confusion: Fanny Trollope and Portraits of Indian Chiefs

Christine DeVine, Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette

devine@louisiana.edu

Fanny Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans, an account of her two year stay in and travels around the United States beginning in 1827, reveals her need to portray herself as a "Cultured" European who wants to compare all she sees and experiences with her own well-developed notions of "good taste." Her use of culture is strategic in that she uses it to critique democracy—the main fault of which is, in her view, its predictable tendency to engender low culture. From New Orleans to Niagara, Trollope uses what appear to be anecdotes of personal experiences, moments of "low culture," in service of her greater critique of America, a strategy which reaches its apotheosis in the scene when she describes an exhibition of paintings of Indian chiefs at the Department of Indian Affairs in Washington, DC.

Trollope uses this ekphrastic moment to blur the boundaries she herself sets up in her book's title between the masculine and feminine sphere, between low and high culture. Through it she not only appropriates the Native Americans represented there, but also indicts the whole project of the new democracy.

Exquisite and Vulgar: What Popular Means in the Early Reviews of Dickens

Lisa Rodensky, Wellesley Coll.

lrodensk@wellesley.edu

This paper attends to the terms popular and popularity in early Victorian novel reviews and explores how reviewers use these terms to subvert and reaffirm literary hierarchies. Large this field is, so I narrow it by looking in particular at the way the terms operate in the early reviews of Dickens’ work. These reviews register the shifting meanings of popular/popularity and map out an ambiguous territory between high and low. At stake here is not only a literary canon but also its relation to and definition of a reading public. More than any other group of novel reviews of the period, Dickens’ reviews both illuminate our own understanding of the history of popular/popularity as terms associated with literature and reveal the complicated responses to and hierarchical placement of what was called popular literature at the moment such a label became more current. In the course of my discussion, I will take up Raymond Williams’ brief analysis of popular/popularity in Keywords, the most provocative aspect of which identifies a shift in the way popular/popularity function in the 19^th century. In addition to Keywords and select reviews of Dickens’ novels, I also consider David Masson’s 1855 British Quarterly Review essay “Publishers’ Circulars and Literary Advertisements for 1854” in which popular (and its relation to Dickens and others) plays a key role. Masson creates “zones” of literature on an imagined “National Parnassus of Literature.” The range of popular as a term in Masson’s text exposes its resistance to hierarchical fixity.