This post has been contributed by Catherine Quirk. See her previous posts here and here.

The theme for this year’s North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) conference, held in sunny St. Petersburg, Florida from 11-14 October, was “Looking Outward.” On first glance, this would seem like a theme quite close to Dickens’s heart,though perhaps more from a critical perspective than from one of intellectual consideration and inclusivity. In Bleak House, for instance, Dickens critiques this very practice of “Looking Outward” when it comes at the expense of looking inward. Mrs. Jellyby’s obsession with Borrioboola-Gha provides the focus for a fair percentage of Dickens’s social commentary on the dangers involved in ignorance—willful or otherwise—of problems at home. In our introduction to Mrs. Jellyby in Chapter IV, “Telescopic Philanthropy,” Esther is told by Mr. Kenge that their hostess for the evening

is a lady of very remarkable strength of character, who devotes herself entirely to the public. She has devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa; with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry – and the natives – and the happy settlement, on the banks of the African rivers, of our superabundant home population.

(49-50; original emphasis)

Mrs. Jellyby’s interest, even before we see the disastrous state of her own home, is described as outward-looking, as addressed “entirely to the public.” Kenge further characterizes her philanthropy as addressed to the “settlement […] of our superabundant home population,” which not only looks beyond the shores of England but also aims at removing people from those shores. As so many critics have discussed, Mrs. Jellyby’s telescopic view, which she focuses so fixedly on the settlements of Borrioboola-Gha, blinds her to the settlements of her own city, and of her own house, which is “not only very untidy but very dirty” (53).[i]

While Dickens overtly critiques Mrs. Jellyby’s far-reaching outward focus, which operates at the expense of her domestic life, he also implicitly critiques Esther’s parallel outward focus. Dickens writes Esther, like Mrs. Jellyby, as a character more interested in looking beyond herself, a focus which often results in an apparent lack of self-awareness. Unlike the omniscient narrator responsible for the other half of the novel, Esther cannot access the secret interiorities of the other characters; Dickens’s implied critique of Esther, however, comes in her similar inability to narrate her own interiority. She constantly pauses, delays, and otherwise circumvents the reader’s full access to her story. Esther’s opening sentence draws our attention to just how difficult it will be to parse concrete meaning from her portion of the novel: “I have a great deal of difficulty in beginning to write my portion of these pages,” she explains, attributing her difficulties to her lack of“clever[ness]” (27). After this brief initial assessment of her own faults, Esther immediately begins to speak of everyone but herself. She introduces the reader to her godmother, to Mrs. Rachel, to her “dear old doll” (27), and very deliberately to her lack of a mother, before even providing us with her own name (29). Dickens emphasizes Esther’s sustained self-effacement in the final chapter’s conventional tying-up of loose ends,which he relates in Esther’s voice, rather than that of the omniscient narrator. Even her restored beauty, with which the novel famously closes,becomes a reflection of others: “I know that my dearest little pets are very pretty, and that my darling is very beautiful, and that my husband is very handsome, and that my guardian has the brightest and most benevolent face that ever was seen; and that they can very well do without much beauty in me – even supposing—” (989). Esther’s constant focus outward—on other characters, rather than on her own situation, feeling, or response—positions her as a frustratingly unreliable narrator. Her inability (or perhaps her unwillingness) to narrate her own story at times leaves Dickens’s reader in a state that parallels that of Caddy Jellyby: struggling to create cohesion out of chaos.

Given this skeptical presentation of looking outward, then, it is perhaps fitting that Dickens, for the most part, stayed in the background in St. Petersburg. He certainly was one of the most-quoted figures, appearing as introductory or supporting material in countless papers, and of course standing as the focus of many individual papers. Only 19 of the nearly 130 listed panels, however, included at least one paper with Dickens, a Dickens novel, or a Dickens character mentioned or referenced in the title, and unlike previous NAVSA conferences, there was a distinct lack of Dickens-devoted panels. “Looking Outward,” it seems, does not inspire the usual surplus of Dickensian analysis. Instead, conference attendees were treated to multiple panels and papers on authors such as Olive Schreiner, innumerable George Eliot panels, papers, and references, and quite a bit of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Many of the Dickens papers appeared to be comparative in nature, using Dickens (judging from the titles listed in the conference program) to add a layer of canonicity to discussion of a lesser-studied novel, author, or event with closer ties to the conference theme. Brittany Carlson, for instance, paired Bleak House with Thomas Carlyle’s Chartism to examine Victorian speculation and gambling, while Anthony Teets centred a reading of slavery and the gothic imagination in Oliver Twist. Though Dickens’s oeuvre does include quite a bit of looking and the spectacular (in all senses), he tends not to address the related concept of looking out or looking beyond, except as part of his larger social critique, as in Bleak House. Instead, he often relegates consideration of anything beyond the immediate scope of his and his characters’ eyes to subtext and implication, to be construed by readers rather than overtly provided by the author. In Dombey and Son, for instance, he deliberately removes Walter Gay from the central half of his narrative,avoiding the necessity of depicting in any detail the exploitative implications of the eponymous trading firm.

The NAVSA conference theme, “Looking Outward,” not only addressed the tendency of Victorian Studies to look primarily at specific geographical areas and critical methodologies, but also encouraged us to look beyond the canonical, to leave Dickens in the background at least for a few days and focus instead on the lesser-known, the under-discussed, and perhaps even the unknown. Where Dickens did appear most regularly was in panels, round tables, and papers addressing pedagogy and teaching practices. The Dickens novel, to judge from such presentations this year at NAVSA, has become the perfect jumping-off point in teaching the Victorian novel and the nineteenth century more broadly, as well as their modern parallels. Jill Galvan, in one of the pedagogy roundtables, reflected on her single-author course, which pairs Bleak House with such texts as Jane Eyre and the film Get Out, using the Dickens’s novel as a central point to address larger issues of gender, class,and race, in both historic and modern contexts. As with some of the comparative papers given at the conference, Dickens remains a pillar of the Victorian novel classroom, around which innovative, transnational, outward-looking scholarship can be built. Victorian studies, then, at NAVSA and in the classroom, looks outward from Dickens into the rich realms of the rest of the nineteenth century. Or perhaps, as Hortense does, “look[s] out, sideways” (665).

[i]Sajni Mukherji, for instance, contends that “Dickens […] believed that genuine charity could not ignore suffering in one’s own society,” and that his depiction of Mrs. Jellyby’s “home and the turmoil caused in it by violent philanthropy a long way away” reflects this belief (PE-14). Frank Christianson similarly reads Mrs. Jellyby’s outward-looking philanthropy as “limited, or limiting” (86). See also Tarr and Thorne.

Works Cited

Christianson, Frank. Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Penguin, 2003.

Mukherji, Sajni. “Telescopic Philanthropy: Attitudes to Charity and the Empire in Charles Dickens.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 16, No. 42/43, 1981, pp. PE9-PE11; PE13-PE18.

Tarr, Rodger L. “The ‘Foreign Philanthropy Question’ in Bleak House: A Carlylean Influence.” Studies in the Novel,Vol. 3, No. 3, 1971, pp. 275-283.

Thorne, Susan. Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England.Stanford University Press, 1999.