Dickens and Decadence

Giles Whiteley is Professor of English Literature at Stockholm University. He has published widely on the literature of the long nineteenth-century, with a particular focus on aestheticism and decadence. He is the author of four monographs including, most recently, The Aesthetics of Space in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, 1843–1907 (2020). Other recent publications include the three-volume edition Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century Culture (2024). He is currently editing Walter Pater’s historical novel Marius the Epicurean. Jonathan Foster is a PhD candidate at Stockholm University whose research explores the relationship between literature and public administration, focusing on representations of state bureaucracy in British fiction during the long nineteenth century. He has published articles on this topic in Dickens Quarterly and Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. He has also co-edited special issues of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies and Administory: Journal for the History of Public Administration.

Here a high-end collection of scholars addresses the great novelist’s condemnation of the decadence of Victorian Britain, the decadence of his own prose and his appropriation by the Decadent writers of the Fin de Siècle, one of the world’s most stimulating literary periods. Rich food for thought, including examinations of realism, sincerity, cruelty, modernism, magic and even dining.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsSeries PrefaceNotes on ContributorsList of AbbreviationsIntroduction: From Dickens’s Decadence to a Decadent DickensGiles Whiteley and Jonathan Foster Part I. Dickens on Decadence1. ‘I almost wonder that YOU never turned your thoughts to Africa’: Decadent Commodity Culture in Bleak HouseGrace Moore 2. Skimpole’s Peasant Boy: Dickens, Tolstoy and DecadenceTom Hubbard 3. Maladministration: Dickens, Decadence and the Higher Civil ServiceJonathan Foster 4. ‘The Spike that Intervenes’: The Corruption of the East by the Decadence of the West in The Mystery of Edwin DroodPete OrfordPart II. Dickens’s Decadence5. The Theatre of Cruelty of Our Mutual FriendJohn Bowen6. ‘But then I mean so much that I – that I don’t mean’: Sincerity and Decadence in Our Mutual FriendTamsin Evernden7. Dickens: Dining DecadentlyClaire Wood8. Anti-Chronology: Decadence in Carlyle, Dickens and BaudelaireJeremy TamblingPart III. Decadent Dickens9. Huysmans’ Dickensian Ark: Decadence and the DomesticGiles Whiteley10. ‘When to Lie and How’: Caricature and the Decadent Legacy of Charles DickensKimberly J. Stern11. Charles Dickens, Arthur Machen and the Aesthetic Alchemy of ThingsDennis Denisoff12. Three Masters: Charles Dickens in the Work of Stefan Zweig, Gustav Meyrink and Franz KafkaJames Dowthwaite Postscript: Dickens’s Wild StyleGiles WhiteleyIndex