Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism (AMS Studies in the Nineteenth Century)

We inevitably think of Dickens as the London novelist, but rarely do we consider what we mean when we refer to Dickens’s urban realism. In this study of Dickens’s representation of the city, Efraim Sicher places Dickens’s major novels within Victorian discourses about the city and rereads the fictional world Dickens portrayed as a dialogical response to those debates. Dickens’s city emerges as surprisingly grim and bleak, and we must ask whether the regeneration Dickens invests in several of his protagonists is a resistance to the corrupt city in its romantic trope, or whether salvation can be found in the city itself. Rereading the City/Rereading Dickens has been acclaimed as an important scholarly achievement that deftly crosses the disciplinary boundaries between literature and history, reexamining modes of realism and giving a new understanding of the modernity of London, well before Baudelaire’s flâneur sauntered along Paris boulevards. Dickens is seen, moreover, in a wider perspective, with fascinating comparisons with Poe and Hugo. This new edition has been updated to take account of the latest scholarship and has been completely revised.