Dickens in Arabia: Going Astray in Tripoli

This article explores the post-colonial ironies and complexities of teaching the novels of Charles Dickens in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli during a teaching assignment between the years 2007–2011. The starting point of the article is an engagement with Dickens’s reception among Lebanese students, accounting for the enthusiasm with which the students embraced his novels, particularly Oliver Twist. The undergraduates, who were bi- or trilingual, claimed the novelist spoke directly to them, despite the fact that he wrote in English and was concerned with existence over 150 years ago. Anecdotal discussion and interview material is brought to bear in an assessment of the affinities Dickens’s style might have with current popular aesthetic modes and political discourse in Lebanon, particularly his use of sentimentality and the melodramatic mode. The article then moves into an exploration of the aesthetics of reading Dickens. If one puts to one side historical and geographical differences, this paper asks, can one learn anything about life in an Arab city like Tripoli, through an engagement with Dickens’s fictional London wanderings? Can one walk in a foreign city and experience it through the textual lens of Dickens’s urban sensibility? Did Dickens see poverty like Tripoli’s in London in the mid-nineteenth century? Is poverty, seen in this phenomenological light, somehow universal? What light does this throw upon Dickens’s representations and the students’ reaction to it? Taking, finally, a post-colonial critical position, the article asks what, in this post-colonial age, can be said about Dickens’s relationship to cultures of the Middle East? Is it merely ‘orientalist’ to teach Dickens, to see the experience of the city of Tripoli as connected to a reading of Dickens? Was Dickens himself, who lived and worked at the heart of the British Empire, inextricably caught up, physically and imaginatively, with the Orient?