Chris Louttit is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Radboud University in the Netherlands. He is the current Vice-President of the Dickens Society, having served previously as a Trustee and been a frequent participant at Dickens Society Symposia since 2004. His PhD was on Dickens, and in 2009 he published Dickens’s Secular Gospel: Work, Gender, and Personality. Since then, his research has turned to a broader range of mid-Victorian fiction and its multi-media afterlives, with a particular interest in Dickensian adaptation and illustration. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed, generalist journal English Studies.

Contact Email: chris.louttit@ru.nl

Twitter Handle: @drchrislouttit

Q: Can you tell us a little bit about how you first discovered Dickens’s work?

I’d like to be able to offer a touching story of how I discovered Dickens young and have been awe of him ever since. I think in my childhood and teens, however, I was largely exposed to Dickens’s work in adaptation, preferring contemporary fiction as a rule, and only really engaged with his writing at university. As an undergraduate at Aberdeen, I was fortunate enough to take two short seminar modules on Dickens taught by Paul Schlicke and Hazel Hutchison. It was this intensive experience of reading and writing about Dickens that really sparked my enthusiasm for his work. From there I went on to a Victorian Studies MA at  Leicester and then on to my Dickens PhD.

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

There are a number of strands to my current research: Dickens, of course, but also sensation fiction, literary Bohemianism, and neo-Victorianism in fiction, film, and television. In my Dickens work, I’ve just finished a book chapter on J.B. Handelsman’s graphic adaptation of Dickensian characters and scenes in his 1990s New Yorker cartoons. Using recent work on intermedial adaptation as a starting point, I read these as micronarratives that don’t just respond to the original text and its first illustrations, but rather adapt a Dickensian macrotext made up of a complex, layered network of other visual and cultural forms. I also have another article in the works on Fred Barnard’s Character Sketches from Dickens (1879-85). This builds on my fascination with the Household Edition illustrators and Barnard in particular, and explains how and why Barnard’s Character Sketches became such influential ‘Dickens pictures’ by recovering their relation to and exploitation by the popular visual culture of the late-Victorian period and beyond. These two projects are part of a broader fascination with the posthumous Dickens and the Dickensian in culture, and I’ll certainly be coming back to Dickens’s later illustrators, Dickens ephemera, and the Dickens cartoon in my future research.

Q: Can you tell us about some Dickens scholarship (such as a monograph, article, biography or exhibition) that has inspired your work and why?

I’m not sure I can narrow this down to one thing! My general conception of Dickens’s literary and cultural significance has been particularly influenced by two monographs that place the work of the Inimitable at the heart of popular radicalism and mass culture more broadly: Sally Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007) and Juliet John’s Dickens and Mass Culture (2010). More specifically, my work has been inspired by those who have engaged with Dickens and illustration. I’m thinking here of scholars such as Gareth Cordery and Robert L. Patten who have responded so perceptively to Dickens’s works as resonant dialogues between pictures and text.

Q: What is your favourite Dickens anecdote?

It’s a well-known one, but as someone fascinated by adaptations – and an enthusiastic member of the Dickens Society Players at this year’s Symposium! – I have to go for the anecdote about Dickens going to see George Almar’s ‘Oliver Twist. A Serio-Comic Burletta’ at the Surrey Theatre in 1838. Dickens was so upset by what he saw that, according to John Forster, ‘in the middle of the first scene he laid himself down upon the floor in the corner of the box and never rose from it until the drop scene fell’.

Q: If you were having a dinner party for Dickens and two other nineteenth-century guests, who would you invite and why?

This is a tough one! My dream guests beyond Dickens would be Henry Mayhew and Harriet Martineau. In the case of the former, I’d just like to hear his stories about meeting and talking to the working poor in nineteenth-century London. He’d also perhaps have things to say to Dickens about the more famous novelist’s own representation of street life in the period. I’ve chosen Martineau not because I’m particularly interested in her work, but since her own perspectives on Victorian society and the place of women within it could lead to some fascinating discussions with the men at the table. And what’s a good fantasy dinner party without a bit of beef (metaphorical, that is) between the guests?

Q: What Dickens adaptation (television or film) is your favourite and why? (Think of this question as a recommendation for our readers to watch).

As with the scholarship question, I could give so many answers to this one! I think, though, I have to be (relatively) topical and go with Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019). I enjoyed so many elements of Iannucci’s adaptation: its wit, energy, and warmth, the brilliant performances across the board (with particular nods to Dev Patel and Ben Whishaw), and the subtle, moving score by Christopher Willis. What impressed me most of all, though, was the way in which Iannucci was able to give visual, cinematic expression to the development of David’s writerly imagination, and more generally to find ways of screening the heightened realism of Dickens’s novel. Subjectivity and fantasy are blended skilfully and amusingly with reality throughout, and the line between David and Dickens as writers is intriguingly blurred too. I won’t say much more than that, as it might spoil it a bit for those who haven’t seen the film yet. If you are one of those people and are also interested in Dickens: what are you waiting for, go and stream it now!