This inaugural episode of the Literary Encyclopedia’s occasional podcast examines the life and reputation of Charles Dickens. In a wide-ranging conversation, five scholars from around the world discuss the decadent side to Dickens’s writing. Topics range from Dickens’s engagement with the British empire and global trade, to his international celebrity, fan fiction, and literary afterlives.

This essay begins by discussing Victorian responses to euphuism, the ‘affected’ style of writing associated with the early modern author John Lyly. Focusing on Walter Pater’s association of euphuism with ‘decadent’ style at the fin de siècle, the essay analyses how euphuism was discussed, theorised, and characterised during the early modern period, noting the ways in which later critics might have considered this euphuistic style as ‘decadent.’ More specifically, comparison shows that both early modern euphuism and Pater’s ‘decadent’ style sought to figure themselves as a mode of ‘New English’ which embraced a certain sense of literary and linguistic ‘cosmopolitanism.’

Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens’s work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence. It includes chapters dealing with Dickens’s treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siècle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s–1920s responded to Dickens. This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence.

This postscript discusses Dickens’s style, informed by contemporary and later debates around stylistic ‘decadence’. Guided by Walter Pater’s treatment of Dickens, and his own theory of aestheticist style, the postscript surveys a number of writers who discussed both Dickens’s style, decadent style and Decadent style during the nineteenth century from the 1830s onwards. The discussion considers questions including the politics of style and Dickensian poetics, and the ways in which Dickens can be read alongside various decadent theories of style emblematized by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget, and Arthur Symons, amongst others.

This essay considers some of the ethical issues surrounding the objectifying tendencies of the aesthetic gaze, both during the nineteenth century and today, with particular reference to the ways in which it treats the female body. It discusses Max Beerbohm's famous essay “A Defence of Cosmetics” (1894) before turning to Walter Pater's ethics and finally addressing what these debates might reveal to us about aestheticism today, with reference to Vernon Lee's take on the aesthetic gaze in her imaginary portrait “Dionea” (1890).

This essay revisits the presence of Dickens in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ ‘breviary of decadence’ À rebours (1884). Noting the ways in which Dickens is introduced in relation to the topic of sex and eroticism, the essay offers a new reading of Huysmans’ response to Dickens by focusing on his discussion of the Dickensian novel as a kind of ‘cosy ark’ protecting Victorian domesticity from the realities of the world ‘outside’. The chapter contextualises this imagery alongside an earlier version of this material which Huysmans had tried out in his essay on the 1881 sixth Impressionist exhibition, and unpacking Huysmans’ allusions to the contemporary French art scene. The discussion then considers lexical echoes which link this image of the Dickensian ark to Huysmans’ earlier description of des Esseintes’ own home at Fontenay-aux-Roses which is figured as an ark protecting the aesthete from the mediocrity and monotony of Parisian everyday life. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Jugendstil and the interior, this image is read both as a critique of Dickens and realism, but also as a defence of Dickens’s own aestheticism. 

The introduction begins by considering posthumous responses to Dickens’s late ‘decadence’, the supposed weakening of his powers in the final years of his career. It contextualizes the use of the word of ‘decadence’ to describe the late Dickens in John Forster and Margret Oliphant alongside the ways in which the idea of decadence was developed during the nineteenth century, first in the study of Latin literature and then in the new aesthetic doctrine just then developing in France and Britain. Noting and briefly discussing some of the large number of decadent authors who discussed or were influenced by Dickens, the introduction situates the topic of Dickens and Decadence within the context of the critical history of both Dickens studies and Decadence studies.

The chapter contextualizes the composition of Dorian Gray, its publication history, and its contemporaneous reception. Following recent scholarship, it treats Dorian Gray as two different but connected texts, produced for two separate markets. It considers the American journal Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine’s courting of Wilde, and how Dorian Gray relates to his other writing during the period and to other intellectual contexts, most notably the influence of Huysmans and Pater. It details some of the interventions Wilde’s editor Stoddart made to the text before its publication to excise material deemed too suggestive, and charts the novel’s reception, both the initial furore in the periodical press and Wilde’s careful attempts to counter criticism that summer. It then turns to Wilde’s rewriting for the 1891 novel version, published by Ward, Lock & Co., discussing the different market for which this novel was produced and the effect of the seven new chapters, and also discusses the continued criticism Dorian Gray was subjected to in the British press. It considers what might be gleaned from Ricketts’s design work as to Wilde’s hopes for its reception and concludes by discussing the ways in which Carson would use the novel in his prosecution in Wilde’s 1895 trial.

This article focuses on Katherine Mansfield's reading of the German philosopher Karl Vaihinger, illustrating how she understood his ideas via Havelock Ellis, before Vaihinger's influence in the English-speaking world was widespread. It shows how her acts of interpretation reshape Vaihinger to argue that Mansfield's "modernism" focuses on the disjunction between "reality" and fiction.