Haunted England: Dickens and the Gothic Imagination

Abstract

<p>Historically, the Gothic, both in its plastic and literary manifestations, may be broadly defined as a reactive aesthetic movement--reactive against classicism, Reason and, most importantly, social convention. Typically, the Gothic imagination, as exhibited in eighteenth-century Romantic fiction, seeks out sensations which are morally and psychologically aberrant, and experiences which are sometimes flagrantly anti-social, these predilections expressing a grave mistrust of the status quo and, at the same time, an angst at having lost a coherent ethical framework. This thesis attempts to gauge the artistic, intellectual and emotional impact of the Gothic tradition on Dickens the social critic. My intent essentially is to set Dickens within the general context of dark Romanticism, to demonstrate how he exploits the "horrid" imagery (ghosts, corpses, corruption) and melodramatic narrative technique of Gothic romance quite as competently as any sensation novelist, yet turns them to the account of a dedicated<br />Victorian social conscience. I focus primarily on Bleak House, probably Dickens's most emphatically "Romantic" novel, but also take some note of his earlier and later career.</p>