From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction Judith Fisher (bio) Amanpal Garcha, From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. vii + 278, $95 cloth. From Sketch to Novel is lucidly written and offers some intriguing original readings, especially of Elizabeth Gaskell. Amanpal Garcha presents a good case for the importance of narrative voices—not over plot, certainly, but as equally important. Given this argument, the focus on the “sketch” makes sense: it is in brief pieces such as Dickens’s Sketches by Boz and Thackeray’s Paris Sketchbook (two major foci in this work) that both authors experimented and found their characteristic voices, so important in creating a community of readers for their serial fiction. Thackeray and Dickens are well-suited to this study because both trained as journalists and essayists while gradually moving into novel writing. Gaskell is less appropriate because she worked almost entirely in fiction; in fact, the “sketch” Garcha finds is one three-page poem Gaskell coauthored with her husband. Garcha claims that “Two defining features of the sketch—its emphasis on detailed description and its penchant for pure discursiveness—are directly tied to two related developments that literary historians have pointed to as vital influences on the rise of the novel as well: the advent [End Page 451] of empiricism and the consequent growth and spread of periodical and newspaper journalism” (27). Ultimately, however, the book’s argument is unpersuasive for two reasons. First, there is a lack of precision in the definition of “sketch,” as well as an inadequate demonstration or close reading of sample sketches. If “style” is so crucial an element, Garcha should have provided characteristic stylistic analyses of The Paris Sketchbook, Sketches by Boz, and “Sketches Among the Poor” that would then carry over into the analysis of the novels. Here lies the second weakness of the study: insufficient application of the authors’ sketches to their fiction. Although Garcha claims that two qualities of the sketch are “fragmentation and incompleteness,” we are not shown this fragmentation of incompleteness in any analysis, either in the theoretical chapter or as applied to Thackeray or Gaskell. Is “fragmentation” characteristic of the choice of subject or the treatment? In a visual sketch, it is usually the treatment, but which meaning is intended for these verbal sketches is not clear. A description of a scene may be complete in itself as description, but it also may seem to be a fragment, in that it is not connected to a larger context or narrative. This seems to be the intended application in Garcha’s analysis of the various sketch-forms in the novels, but, of course, such a definition cannot apply to stand-alone sketches or sketches published in periodicals. Here, in fact, Garcha loses a valuable opportunity to place the original sketches in the context of their periodical publications in the Monthly Magazine (Dickens) and Fraser’s Magazine (Thackeray). We get little idea of how the periodical form may have influenced the voice and presentation of subject for these authors. Judith Fisher Trinity University Judith Fisher Judith Fisher is professor of English at Trinity University, San Antonio, TX. She works primarily in Victorian fiction. Her most recent publication is a scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray’s last complete novel, The Adventures of Philip, published by the University of Michigan Press. She is currently working on “The Empire of the Tea-Table: A Literary History of Tea, 1660–1900.” Copyright © 2011 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

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