Introduction: ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’: Dickens and Feeling

19

Bethan Carney¹ 

[1] Birkbeck, University of London;

关键词: Charles Dickens;    Anthony Trollope;    Sentimentality;    Victorian literature;    nineteenth century;   

DOI  :  10.16995/ntn.644

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The introduction to this issue of '19', ‘“Mr Popular Sentiment”: Dickens and Feeling’, considers the turn away from Dickens’s sentimentality in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing upon nineteenth-century reviews, it argues that Dickens’s sentimental characters and pathetic situations were perceived as politically radical and dangerously biased against the upper classes. This became of particular concern from the 1850s onwards, when an increase in literacy and cheaper publications meant that Dickens’s novels could be read by a cross-class mass-market readership. The reaction against ‘Mr Popular Sentiment’ was, in truth, a reaction to his populism and his popularity.

【 授权许可】

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