Dickens' Novels as Poetry

Visiting the language, style, and poetry of Dickens’ novels, this study reads these works as a form of poetry. Arguing that Dickens sees language as always double, it draws on Victorian texts and current critical theory to explore Dickens’ interest in literature and popular song, and in jokes, caricature, word-play, and naming. Examining Dickens’ key novels, Tambling uses caricature, the grotesque, exaggeration, comedy, and punning to show how Dickens writes a new poetry of the city, and that the language constitutes an unconscious and secret autobiography. This book takes Dickens scholarship in exciting new directions and will be of interest to nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies.