Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People by Carolyn Vellenga Berman (review)

Reviewed by: Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People by Carolyn Vellenga Berman Katie Holdway (bio) Carolyn Vellenga Berman, Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. ix + 353, $115/ £90 cloth. Bookended by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, Charles Dickens's writing career lends itself to analysis alongside the unprecedented overhaul of the representative system of government that drastically shaped both literature and political culture during the author's lifetime. And yet, the rich connections between Dickens's writing and political reform remain underappreciated. Studies tend to address the author's personal reform projects or his responses to individual pieces of legislation at the expense of a holistic reading of political representation as it is addressed across his oeuvre. In her wide-ranging and contextually alert study, Carolyn Vellenga Berman takes steps toward addressing this critical lacuna by reading Dickens's novels, journalism, and other texts "in tandem with the literature emanating from Parliament" (2). In doing so, she argues that despite "the persistent linkage of Dickens and democracy, we have underestimated the ways in which his writings can help us understand the challenges of representative government" (3). Marshalling an impressive array of sources with a keen and often playful awareness of their thematic and ideological crosscurrents, Vellenga Berman shows that Dickens's fiction "reveals the struggle between products of print-capitalism (novels, newspapers, magazines) and official publications of the state (blue books) as they sought to represent a modern nation" (19). This approach enables Vellenga Berman to avoid an unnecessary preoccupation with the minutiae of Dickens's political beliefs "by instead grasp[ing] both the radical edges and the nation-building power of his literary [End Page 133] projects" (16). Prioritising the political impact of Dickens's work over his personal ideologies is refreshing and chimes with other cornerstone, context-led studies, such as Sally Ledger's Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (2007), David Parker's "Pickwick and Reform: Origins" (Dickens Studies Annual 45 [2014]: 1–21), and most notably, Patrick Brantlinger's Spirit of Reform (1977), which is one of the book's most significant critical antecedents. At the same time, the book's umbrella theme of "representation" enables Vellenga Berman to take a networked approach to the range of political discourses that shaped Dickens's writing but that are not always discussed together, including legislation relating to the Reform Act, the Poor Laws, Catholic emancipation, and the abolition of colonial slavery (9). Dickens and Democracy leads us through Dickens's writing career chronologically but with an emphasis on intertextual synergies throughout. Chapter 1, "Tracing Characters," opens with a reevaluation of Dickens's relationship with stenography. Carving out an impressive critical niche—even in the wake of the extensive attention that has recently been bestowed upon Dickens's career as a parliamentary reporter—Vellenga Berman argues that although "we have long known about shorthand as an element of Dickens's career, we have not yet seized its role as a fulcrum for media, politics, literature, and print in the nineteenth century" (33). This background leads neatly into two further Reform-focussed chapters. Chapter 2, "Breach of Privilege," addresses the intersection of Dickens's family history with the passage of the Great Reform Act as well as the impact of parliamentary privilege on the fraught relationship between public and private oratory in both Dickens's fiction and the wider world. Chapter 2 also includes an astute analysis of Barnaby Rudge (1841), not simply as a novel of the Gordon Riots but as a "re-presentation of the historical events that Dickens witnessed in the early 1830s: anti-Catholic riots prompting changes in parliamentary representation, through the Reform Act of 1832" (76). It would be fascinating to see this case study developed into a long-form article. Chapter 3 moves to The Pickwick Papers (1836–37), arguing that the development of more fulsome parliamentary reports—as well as the decision to make the parliamentary papers available for public purchase—in the 1830s acted as a "key backdrop for the emergence" of Dickens's first serial novel (90). This chapter will be of particular...

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