Think of a Charles Dickens novel—pick almost any one. When you think about it, Dickens’ novels are packed with people, from myriad named characters to the nameless throngs navigating London streets and those overcrowding orphanages, prisons, factories, and workhouses. The population practically presses the margins of the pages and crowds the confines of each chapter.
In her book, Populating the Novel: Literary Form and the Politics of Surplus Life, Emily Steinlight examines, not the well-studied characters of Dickens novels, or those of other 19th-century British writers such as Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad, but the unidentified masses that pervade their literary works.
“Reading 19th-century novels, and especially the novels of Dickens, I became more and more interested in their sheer crowdedness—their human density,” says Steinlight, the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English. “There’s a sense, I think, when you read a novel like Bleak House, not just of the number of named characters, who are nearly impossible to keep track of, but of crowding that almost exceeds the capacity to give names to people, or even to describe them in impressionistic ways.”
Dickens’ novels, and those of several of his contemporary British writers, could be seen to mirror the times. During the 19th century, the population of England and Wales more than tripled, from about 8.9 million in 1801 to 32.5 million in 1901, as the country moved from a rural, agrarian economy to an urban, industry-centered economy.
In Populating the Novel, Steinlight contends that, rather than simply reflecting this demographic growth, such pervasive literary crowding contributed to a seismic shift in British political thought.
Read more at Omnia magazine.
