Imagine a foggy evening in the docklands of Victorian London, illuminated by the then-modern gas lighting. Apart from the shady pubs and brothels, most of the town’s opium dens could be found here. Naturally, this and other aspects of the Victorian era decadence caught the attention of Charles Dickens.
Dickens and Decadence is edited by Professor Giles Whiteley and Dr. Jonathan Foster. Bringing together leading scholars from the fields of Dickens studies and decadence studies, this collection considers the ways in which Dickens’s work can be placed into dialogue with various ideas of decadence.
It includes chapters dealing with Dickens’s treatment of the decadence he saw manifested in mid-Victorian society; his treatment of the themes of decadence and decay in his work, including anticipations of, and unconscious sympathies towards positions which came to define fin-de-siècle Decadence; and the ways in which Decadent writers from the 1880s–1920s responded to Dickens.
This book therefore broadens our understanding of the work and the significance of Dickens as a pre-eminent Victorian novelist and also deepens our understanding of the contours of fin-de-siècle Decadence.
