Presented by: Dr Adam Grener

This seminar will provide an overview of Charles Dickens’s Working Notes and offer a case study of the kinds of interpretative questions they raise in understanding Dickens’s navigation of serial form. Beginning with his seventh novel, Dombey and Son (1848), Dickens kept Working Notes for each novel, where he made plans and took notes on a single sheet of paper for each instalment of a novel’s twenty monthly numbers. These Notes have been available to readers as facsimiles, and transcriptions are now included in some editions of his novels; however, they rarely garner attention from critics because of the way in which they are made available. Attention to the manuscripts of the Notes themselves shows that—rather than mere “blueprints” for each instalment—these Notes are laboratories of experimentation where Dickens tests combinations of characters and events, asks and answers questions, and returns as late as the following month to make additions. This talk will offer an overview of the Notes and explain how access to their archival materiality can help us to understand how Dickens worked within the rigid yet predictable structure of serial form. It will then provide a more detailed account of the Working Notes for Hard Times (1854) where Dickens had to manage a shorter novel that was to be published in weekly—rather than monthly—instalments. Although the novel itself offers a sustained critique of the Utilitarian calculus and modes of quantification, the Working Notes show how Dickens’s compositional methods  complicate the opposition between quantification and imagination that the novel itself explores.

Biography:

Adam Grener teaches in the English Programme, Victoria University of Wellington. His Improbability, Chance, and the Nineteenth-Century Realist Novel will be published by Ohio State University Press in 2020.