August 15, 2025
Thanks to Peter Ponzio, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
The forty-fifth annual Dickens Universe ran from July 20 through July 26, 2025. Attendance at the Universe is accomplished virtually or physically at the University of California Santa Cruz campus. For the current year, attendance was down, due in part to the novel selected for this year’s discussion, The Old Curiosity Shop.
The novel is not considered one of Dickens’ best works, and is criticized by many as being overly sentimental. As with past Universes, the discussions and seminars shed new light on this novel and while not everyone in attendance came away with a higher ranking of the novel in Dickens’ cannon, new insights into the work were gained as a result of the six days of intensive study.
The Universe is structured around the following parts: a faculty-led discussion group; a morning lecture; a graduate-led discussion group; a Dickensian seminar; two late afternoon and evening lectures; an optional film screening; a gala featuring Victorian dance and an auction.
The faculty and graduate-led discussion groups and the Dickensian seminar focused on a variety of topics, including: the change in narrator after the first four chapters; the notion of observing in the novel; the tension between realism and the fairy-tale in the work; the nature of curiosity; Victorian attitudes towards women; Dickens’ use of allegory and romance; the incidence of broken families in the novel and in Dickens’ work in general; the search for home in the novel; the nature of sentimentalism; and a discussion of the various characters in the work.
A brief discussion of each of the seminars follows.
Teresa Mangum, of the University of Iowa was the first speaker and focused on the topic of age in The Old Curiosity Shop. Teresa noted that there were 1,231 references to age in the novel and 231 references to youth which led to age as a shaping force in the novel. Teresa argued that the grandfather was the novel’s protagonist and that his primary motivation was fear of loss.
Dan Novak, of the University of Alabama, argued that Dickens used the metaphor of the magic lantern in the construction of The Old Curiosity Shop. He noted that Dickens’ experience in the theater, along with the recent development of photography, contributed to the phantasmagoric feel of the novel. Further, the novel oscillates between stasis and movement which contributes to a feeling of discontinuity in the work.
Carolyn Williams, Rutgers University, argued that The Old Curiosity Shop is a melodrama. She posited that melodrama was a genre that was originally a musical piece accompanied by an instrument. The parts of a melodrama used in The Old Curiosity Shop alternated between the tragic and the comic, silence, and sound, static and changing. Carolyn noted that there are three major themes in the novel: villains, tears, and tableau or painting on a tablet.
The next speaker, Tara Melon from Harvard University, used computer programming to study the use of direct speech in The Old Curiosity Shop and other Victorian novels. Tara noted that the study of direct speech asks four questions: who speaks, how much they speak, when they speak and to whom they speak. The study of direct speech is useful to understand characters in a novel, understand the social aspects of speech and is helpful in revealing the structure of the novel. Tara noted that in a novel, the protagonist usually speaks the most, 22 to 49% of the time. However, in The Old Curiosity Shop, no character speaks more than 15% of the time, which leads to questions about whether the book is a novel, whether a novel can operate without a defined protagonist, and whether the book is a tale.
Representing Ohio State University, Jacob Risinger argued that The Old Curiosity Shop was a novel about what it means to have enough. According to Risinger, the novel raises questions about what it means to have enough: what is enough? Who has enough? Is the economy of the 1820’s and 1830’s one of excess and privation? Is “enough” an ethical question, not only monetarily, but in raising children: do parents do enough to benefit their children in the novel? Many of the characters in the novel do not have “enough”: including Nell and her grandfather, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness. Jacob ended by saying that “enough” is only known by excess and subsequent depletion.
One of the frequent scholars at the Universe is Jonathan Grossman from UCLA. Jonathan gave an impromptu talk about transgender and queer characters in The Old Curiosity Shop. Sally Brass is often referred to as masculine and among her epithets are fellow, old fellow, rascal, chap, and old boy, among others. This leads to a mis-gendering of Sally as well as her character being peculiarly flat. Because of her mis-gendering, Jonathan asserts that she has an unassigned gender which represents a “glitch” in the system of the novel. A second trans-gendering occurs when at Mrs. Jarley’s waxworks, Mary Queen of Scots is transformed into Lord Byron. The novel not only describes gender sexually, but is also grounded in notions of society and social structure.
Maha Jafri of Sewanee, the University of the South, notices several complimentary structures relating to size in The Old Curiosity Shop and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Both Nell and Alice are wanderers in an unknown journey. Both are small, and in the case of Alice, her shrinking and growth lead to an identity crisis. Alice’s change in size is a metaphor for the transition from childhood to adulthood. Nell, on the other hand, never grows, nor does she make the transition from child to adult: she is trapped in time. The word little appears 600 times in the novel and Nell’s littleness is mirrored by other characters in the novel, including Quilp, the Marchioness, Short Trotters, Punch and Judy and the grandfather. The novel can be seen as a metaphor for death versus life: Nell and Quilp exemplify Freud’s death drive while characters like Kit, Swiveller and the Marchioness exemplify the life drive.
Attending the Universe from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Galia Benziman gave a talk on seeing and realism in The Old Curiosity Shop. Galia posited that realism relies on an emotional reaction and that there are two modes of seeing in the work. The first mode is what Galia terms the uncanny, which is often associated with the Gothic. The second mode of seeing is termed transitional and is associated with realistic portrayals in novels. According to Galia, Master Humphrey is the protagonist in the novel as a result of occupying three separate spaces in the novel. Master Humphrey’s first appearance is in the framing device of Master Humphrey’s Clock, where he first introduces the idea of The Old Curiosity Shop. His next appearance is in the novel itself, where he acts as narrator for the first four chapters. Finally, at the end of Master Humphrey’s Clock, the reader is informed that the Strange Gentleman, who is the grandfather’s brother, is actually Master Humphrey. Because Master Humphrey inhabits the framing device of Master Humphrey’s Clock as well as the novel itself, he occupies a vital role in the novel, and is therefore the protagonist.
The next seminar involved three noted Dickens scholars: Robyn Warhol of Ohio State University, Helena Michie from Rice University and Huw Edwardes-Evans a graduate student from Rice University. Warhol, Michie, and Edwardes-Evans began a project several years ago to map the beginnings and endings of Victorian novels in the period from 1834 – 1909, in order find commonalities in the works. Based on their findings, they developed a number of taxonomic categories for these works, as follows: continuation; break and refocus; diurnal; description; flashback; cliffhanger; anti-cliffhanger; in motion; fade out; and threshold. They then listed the number of occurrences of each category and provided examples of each type. Their study revealed that anticipation, suspense, and motion dominated the endings of chapters, while continuation, break and refocus, and description were the most common categories for the beginning of chapters.
The next seminar involved three high school teachers who taught Dickens to their students. The panel consisted of Ray Crosby of Kern Valley High School, Clark Coyd and Catherine Springer of the Paideia School. Ray began the discussion by describing the conditions of the Kern Valley High School, which is located some miles outside of Bakersfield California. Demographically, Kern Valley is composed of agricultural and warehouse/light manufacturing employees and household income skews towards lower middle class. Students perform chores on the farm before and after school, or work in warehouse/light manufacturing after school. Ray noted that because of the time constraints on student’s life, it can be difficult to get them interested in topics like Charles Dickens. Yet despite the obstacles faced in teaching Dickens, Ray’s students identify with Dickens because of his early impoverished background and rise to fame. Ray’s students participate in the Dickens Day of Writing which occurs annually on February 7th, on Dickens’ birthday.
The Paideia school occupies a different social niche than Kern Valley. Students at Paideia come from a middle class to upper middle-class background and studies are important to them. Like the students at Kern Valley, the students at Paideia participate in the Dickens Day of Writing, and the best essays from every high school in the program (more than twenty) are selected for publication in book form.
On the final day of the conference, a Roundtable is held in which every lecturer participates. The purpose of the roundtable is for each of the seminar speakers to reflect on the week’s activities. Among the topics discussed were the vague ending of the novel; the use of allegory by Dickens; the definition of curiosity and the use of the term curiosity to keep the audience interested; the strange lack of sales of the items in the shop; the images of cages and entrapment in the novel; the foreshadowing (sometimes excessive) of Nell’s death, especially when linked to the little scholar; the potential for a queer reading of the old bachelor and the sexton; the passages where Dickens mentions Barbara as a love interest for Kit seem cloying and perhaps they represent Dickens’ repressed sexuality when dealing with young girls.
It is safe to say that based on the faculty and student-led discussions, along with the Dickensian seminar and the talks by Dickens scholars, that attendees came away with a greater appreciation for the work; whether or not they liked the novel more is subject to debate.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/ Everett Collection
