Juliet John

'A body without a head': The Idea of Mass Culture in Dickens's American Notes (1842)

A touchstone of debate in modern cultural theory is the idea of a tension between the goals of commercial culture and those of a genuinely ‘popular’ culture consonant with the values and interests of the populace.2 Speaking in America at the dawn of ‘the first age of mass culture’, Dickens, like notable recent commentators, did not see this tension as inevitable.3 He rightly assumed that a statement of belief in a model of culture that was both capitalist and communal would meet with approval in nineteenth-century America. At this stage of his first trip to the States of 1842, expectations were still high that there would be a perfect meeting of minds between Dickens, the literary superstar associated with democratic, populist values, and America, a New World founded on the principles of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’. Before reaching the States, Dickens had written to the editor of the New York Knickerbocker Magazine of ‘the glow into which I rise, when I think of the wonders that await us’.4 One leading article published during his stay explained that Dickens was a hero for the Americans because of the ‘democratic genius’ and ‘idea of human equality’ that they shared. America was a place ‘where his popular tendencies’ were ‘not likely to be weakened’, and his writings would ‘hasten on the great crisis of the English Revolution (speed the hour!) far more effectively than any of the open assaults of Radicalism or Chartism’.5 But as has been well documented, Dickens and America became mutually disffected during his first visit. Rather than confirming Dickens’s radical or egalitarian tendencies, America had the opposite effect: ‘This is not the Republic of my imagination’, he memorably wrote to Macready.

Dickens and Hamlet

‘If any one of Shakespeare’s plays was known by an individual during the Victorian era that play was Hamlet. ‘1 Valerie L. Gager’s claim about the popularity of Hamlet is perhaps difficult to substantiate, but there is no doubt that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet was the play to which Dickens most often alluded.2 At first sight Dickens’s interest in Hamlet may seem surprising. Dickens, or Mr Popular Sentiment as Trollope infamously called him, was accused of vulgarity and intellectual deficiency from his own day onwards. G. H. Lewes perhaps put the charges most bluntly, maintaining that there was not ‘a single thoughtful remark’ in the whole Dickens canon, and that Dickens ‘never was and never would have been a student’.3 Hamlet, on the other hand, became synonymous with the tortured, alienated intellectual at the play’s centre — a man superbly endowed with intelligent thoughts, but a little short on action. During the nineteenth century, when so many artists and thinkers felt themselves to be, in Isobel Armstrong’s term, ‘secondary’, Hamlet metamorphosed from a flawed Prince to the archetypal hero as artist and thinker.4 Dickens’s fascination with Hamlet, however, was not born of this hero-worship.

Dickens and the Heritage Industry; or, Culture and the Commodity

In the years since Dickens first found fame as an author, his image has been used in many contexts, most suggestively as the face for over a decade of the £10 note.1 On the Dickens note, his image is superimposed on the ‘inimitably English’ scene of the Dingley Dell cricket match in The Pickwick Papers.2 The note associates Dickens, and British currency, with an image of cosy pre-urban, communal life. It fossilises the image of England and of Dickens in a past or ‘heritage’ at odds with the competitive, conflicted context of Victorian Britain. The note captures some of the tensions this chapter will explore — most notably, the paradoxical repression of Dickens’s commercialism, promoted in the unlikely context of the £10 note. I seek to expose the conflict in the heritage industry between the promotion of an anti-materialist ideal of Culture and the commercial, materialist context of that industry’s evolution. In a broader sense, I hope to shed light on the ways in which the history and theory of the term Culture has been haunted by the idea of an antagonism, or even conflict, between the notions of Culture and commerce.