Date Published:

Abstract:

This paper begins by assessing the work of Franco Moretti and his Stanford colleagues in using quantitative formalism for mapping nineteenth-century European fiction. My objection to applying this technology to the writings of Charles Dickens is that quantitative formalism and distant reading conspire with Benthamite calculations to erase the specific in favor of norms established by grossing up thousands of data points. Dickens’s artistic belief in the importance of representing the individual and assessing its relationship to the mass overrides the strategies Moretti practices. Nonetheless, a number of issues raised by him may be amenable to a modified practice of distant reading. In the second half of the paper I propose that if such technology is applied to a single author, Dickens, and is careful to distinguish the times of composition, publication, and reissue of texts, a multi-dimensional interactive map of London, registering the geographic, administrative, and structural times, places, history, and references within his writing, could document both his journalistic realism and his imagination in new ways, and thus better evaluate his contribution to the century’s aesthetic and conceptual achievements.

March 2021: Robert L. Patten, now a retired professor of English at Rice University, is currently a non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies in the School of Advanced Study, University of London. He has published widely on nineteenth-century British and European art, literature, and book history. His two-volume biography of the British graphic artist George Cruikshank was named Outstanding Book in Art History by Choice and the best biography of the 1990s by the London Guardian newspaper. Charles Dickens and “Boz”: The Birth of the Industrial-Age Author received the Colby Award from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and was short-listed for the Christian Gauss Award from Phi Beta Kappa. An early study of Charles Dickens and His Publishers, issued in 1978 by the Clarendon Press, went into a paperback edition and then a revised second edition in 2017 from Oxford UP. Publisher and editor of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 for thirty years, Patten was named Outstanding Literary Editor for 2012 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals.

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