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Nineteenth-Century and Neo-Victorian Cultures

Dickens and Decadence

Edited by Giles Whiteley and Jonathan Foster

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£24.99

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Published 1 February 2027

About this book

Examines themes of decadence in Charles Dickens’s work and the ways in which the Decadent movement responded to Dickens
  • Brings leading Dickensians and leading scholars of Decadence into conversation with one another
  • Broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of the pre-eminent Victorian novelist and deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence
  • Fills gaps in the critical literature on Dickens’s modernism and his late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reception
Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens’s work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence. It includes chapters dealing with Dickens’s treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siècle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s–1920s responded to Dickens. This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence.

Reviews

Here a high-end collection of scholars addresses the great novelist’s condemnation of the decadence of Victorian Britain, the decadence of his own prose and his appropriation by the Decadent writers of the Fin de Siècle, one of the world’s most stimulating literary periods. Rich food for thought, including examinations of realism, sincerity, cruelty, modernism, magic and even dining.
Table of contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Series Preface
Notes on Contributors
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: From Dickens’s Decadence to a Decadent Dickens
Giles Whiteley and Jonathan Foster

Part I. Dickens on Decadence
1. ‘I almost wonder that YOU never turned your thoughts to Africa’: Decadent Commodity Culture in Bleak House
Grace Moore
2. Skimpole’s Peasant Boy: Dickens, Tolstoy and Decadence
Tom Hubbard
3. Maladministration: Dickens, Decadence and the Higher Civil Service
Jonathan Foster
4. ‘The Spike that Intervenes’: The Corruption of the East by the Decadence of the West in The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Pete Orford

Part II. Dickens’s Decadence
5. The Theatre of Cruelty of Our Mutual Friend
John Bowen
6. ‘But then I mean so much that I – that I don’t mean’: Sincerity and Decadence in Our Mutual Friend
Tamsin Evernden
7. Dickens: Dining Decadently
Claire Wood
8. Anti-Chronology: Decadence in Carlyle, Dickens and Baudelaire
Jeremy Tambling

Part III. Decadent Dickens
9. Huysmans’ Dickensian Ark: Decadence and the Domestic
Giles Whiteley
10. ‘When to Lie and How’: Caricature and the Decadent Legacy of Charles Dickens
Kimberly J. Stern
11. Charles Dickens, Arthur Machen and the Aesthetic Alchemy of Things
Dennis Denisoff
12. Three Masters: Charles Dickens in the Work of Stefan Zweig, Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka
James Dowthwaite

Postscript: Dickens’s Wild Style
Giles Whiteley

Index

About the contributors

Giles Whiteley

Giles Whiteley is Professor of English Literature at Stockholm University. He has published widely on the literature of the long nineteenth-century, with a particular focus on aestheticism and decadence. He is the author of four monographs including, most recently, The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 (2020). Other recent publications include the three-volume edition Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2024). He is currently editing Walter Pater’s historical novel Marius the Epicurean.

Jonathan Foster

Jonathan Foster is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University whose research explores the relationship between literature and public administration, focusing on representations of state bureaucracy in British fiction during the long nineteenth century. He has published articles on this topic in Dickens Quarterly and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. He has also co-edited special issues of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Administory: Journal for the History of Public Administration.

More in this series

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