Abstract: This essay returns to Dorothy Van Ghent’s influential mid-twentieth-century reading of Charles Dickens in “The Dickens World: A View from Todgers’s” (1950) and considers how such influence is entangled with the critical intensity of the text and not just its propositional substance. Yet in a paradigmatic way, this felt quality of the critical text—while it might undergird the essay’s impact—has rarely been avowed or scrutinized. What can we see when we address such intensity directly? Van Ghent’s essay is concerned with the strange logic of representation in Dickens’s fiction. It is also, in its close analytical engagement with this fiction, an act of representation itself. Van Ghent brings out this dimension of criticism, as representation, in her vivid foregrounding of a single passage in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) as it provides a “view” onto Dickens’s fiction as a whole. Highlighting the play of representation within criticism, I align the critic’s dramatic effort to grasp the literary text with her defamiliarizing account of Dickens’s own realist aesthetics.
Alex Woloch (Mon,) studied this question.