The Enduring Global Appeal of Charles Dickens

The recent surge of interest in academia in literary texts and practices that go beyond Anglo-American critical contexts has led to the increasing use of terms such as “global” or “worldwide” to describe particular authors or bodies of work. This trend has raised questions about the criteria with which we define a particular writer or work as pertaining to the world rather than a specific culture. As a popular Victorian writer who has enjoyed various afterlives in contemporary culture, Charles DICKENS (1812-70) has likewise been attached to the “global” signifier during and after the bicentenary of his birth in 2012. This chapter in A Companion to World Literature by Dr Klaudia LEE, Associate Professor at the Department of English of CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, is a response to the debates and considerations in relation to the idea of world literature, as well as a critical engagement with Dickens’ writings, in particular the urban realism that he practises and one which has generated diverse creative responses across space and time.

The chapter starts with a short review of, as well as a critical reflection on, the major criticisms that have recently been published that seek to consider the implications of the attention to the “global” on Dickens scholarship and Victorian Studies more broadly. Using circulation of Dickens’ works in countries such as Japan, Italy, Poland and India as examples, it argues that the international appeal of Dickens’ works since their initial publication has been closely related to the various versions or forms of Dickensian texts that are in circulation, and most importantly, the diverse ways in which they have been used to engage with particular concerns of the recipient cultures. To further illustrate the intimate relationship between literary production and sociocultural contexts, this chapter also compares and contrasts two case studies: the publication of the translated Oliver Twist , a major novel by Dickens, in China in 1908, and a front-page publication of a Christmas sketch by Dickens in an English literary journal in Hong Kong in 1903.

The variety of versions and forms of Dickensian texts that this chapter considers demonstrate that the associations between Dickens and “world literature” should probably be best understood as the ability of the texts to generate diverse artistic practices and cultural re-envisioning in particular sociocultural contexts at specific moments of history.