"All the Year Round", Volume I 30 April-22 October, 1859 Nos. 1-26
Modern critics offer excellent reasons why, as Richard Maxwell puts it, "we should acknowledge concision as a good" - Maxwell astutely notes how Sidney Carton, as professional legal "condenser," is a representative in the novel of its author's own power of "boiling down...
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| Published in: | Dickens quarterly 2012-09, Vol.29 (3), p.251-277 |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Modern critics offer excellent reasons why, as Richard Maxwell puts it, "we should acknowledge concision as a good" - Maxwell astutely notes how Sidney Carton, as professional legal "condenser," is a representative in the novel of its author's own power of "boiling down" material - and sees the "condensation" at work in the picturesque, plot-driven Tale as productive of "sustained intellectual clarity," allowing Dickens to embody in his work a well-grounded and mature political and social understanding of the French Revolution that is expressive of, rather than discursive about, its historical force (Maxwell xx-xii; Sanders 1-12). The diminution of strident social comment, on a "less is more" basis (the phrase is Browning's), potentially throws it into greater relief.32 Readers of "Down in the World" (p. 476) would recognize me workhouse visit as, by now, a familiar magazine topic - hence the lack here of any kind of preamble - and, given a similar lack of rhetoric in the conclusion of the paper, which ends on an uncomfortable note of discord, they are arguably required to exercise a degree of independent thinking in order to resolve the issues it raises to their own satisfaction.33 "A Sum in Fair Division" (p. 40) reverts to a longstanding Dickensian complaint, namely the unjust distribution of the poor rates in England, arguing cogently for their equalization - and in particular against "the cruelties of the law of Settlement and Poor Removal." When the anonymous author (perhaps Henry Morley?) refers to the pronouncements of the "Legislature" denying place of domestic service as grounds for settlement "in 1832," he conflates the appointment in 1832 of the Royal Commission to examine the Operation of the Poor Laws, with the effects of the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), and its failure fully to remedy the injustices of the "removal" policy, which dated back to 1662.34 After much debate in the early-to-mid-1840s, a Commons Select Committee was appointed in 1847 to report on settlement and removal, with a "Settlement and Removal" bill eventually introduced in 1854, but complications relating to the Gilbert Union Act (1782) and the settlement of Irish paupers prevented its passage into law, and the 1662 Act was not fully repealed until the 1927 Poor Law Act. A good test piece might be Linton's poem "Great Odds at Sea," which puts the prose of Raleigh's Report of the Truth of the Fight About the lies of Acores This Last Sommer (1591) into blank verse, featurin |
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| ISSN: | 0742-5473 2169-5377 2169-5377 |