The Dickens Society: A Retrospect

Forty years is a lengthy stretch in the life of an organization. Almost equal to two generations, four decades offer latitude for second thoughts, change and new directions. Individuals involved in the founding of an association may have died, defining occasions faded into memory, key decisions forgotten or subsequently revised, and details about the early years lost from sight, visible only through records on which dust has fallen. evolution of the Society offers no exception to such developments. Early issues of Studies Newsletter, the Society's periodical, however, document the organization's history and provide a reliable source from which to trace the circumstances of its origins, those responsible for its foundation and the objectives that brought together students of on both sides of the Atlantic at a moment in history shaped by circumstances unlike those that prevail today. novelist himself of course generated the momentum, a writer whose command of language and creative imagination provided enough material to engage generations of readers, critics and scholars in numbers sufficient to justify use of the epithet, The industry. Significant re-assessments of began in the 1930s;1 but another thirty years passed before consensus emerged about the need to study his reputation in detail and catalogue the outpouring of materials his fiction, journalism and life inspired. One harbinger of the harvest of publications reaped in 1970 by the centenary of his birth was the Symposium moderated by Noel C. Peyrouton at Northeastern University, Boston, on 10 June 1962. Held jointly with the Fellowship, the occasion also served as the Fellowship's 56th Annual Conference and brought together a panel of four distinguished scholars--George H. Ford, Edgar Johnson, J. Hillis Miller and Sylvere Monod--to chart Dickens Criticism: Past, Present, and Future Directions. Eight years later, Ford and Monod joined Philip Collins, K. J. Fielding and Michael Slater to survey Dickens & Fame 1870--1970, contributing five substantial essays on his reputation, each organized by decades. A Prologue by Margaret Lane, The Last Months, and a Postscript by Dilys Powell, Dickens on Film, filled out this landmark survey, published by Fellowship as the Centenary number of Dickensian in 1970. Taken together the two publications made several things clear. Interest in flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, producing material in such volume that keeping abreast of it called for specialists; of these, several felt at home on either shore and signalled their readiness to attend meetings committed to an international agenda. So large were the stakes, however, it made no sense to think of the work ahead in exclusive terms or to define leadership and organization solely with reference to location or to seniority. Founded in London in 1902, the Fellowship was obviously the senior player. It was also one with branches throughout the world, several of which were active in North America. But clearly the time had come for professionals working in the United States and Canada to discuss the prospect of a separate association, one with its own identity and purpose. Interest in the formation of a society in the United States dedicated to the study of first emerged on 29 December 1969 at a seminar on held during the MLA Convention in Denver, Colorado. Following a panel moderated by Robert B. Partlow, Dickens Studies Today and Tomorrow, with presentations by Ada B. Nisbet, Joseph Gold, William F. Axton and Robert L. Patten, and responses by Jerome Meckier, Harry Stone and E. D. H. Johnson, discussion turned to the possibility of forming a society. That particular motion was defeated, but the group resolved on two formative steps. One was to meet the following year in New York City during the 1970 MLA Convention; the second was to ask members of the panel and the moderator to serve as an ad hoc planning committee charged with reporting on the future activities of the group, one of which might include the case for the formation of such a society. …

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