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20 - The historical novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2012

Ian Duncan
Affiliation:
University of California
Sally Ledger
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Holly Furneaux
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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Summary

The ambition to write an historical novel framed the early stages of Dickens's literary career. In May 1836 he signed a contract with John Macrone for a novel called ‘Gabriel Vardon, The Locksmith of London’, which he may have contemplated as early as 1833. ‘Gabriel Vardon’ was to be published in three volumes, a standard format established by the novels of Walter Scott, and would culminate in a treatment of the 1780 Gordon Riots, modelled on the scenes of urban insurrection in Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1818). The second number of Pickwick Papers had just appeared; its huge popularity still before it, Pickwick was classed as a series of comic sketches, ‘a periodical with only one article’, rather than a novel. Although ‘Gabriel Vardon’ would not be published until 1841, in weekly instalments and under the title Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty, it has a claim to be regarded as Dickens's first venture in the novel as the genre was understood in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Dickens aimed at the prestige as well as the immense profits won by Walter Scott's Waverley novels (so called after the first in the series, Waverley, 1814). In his lifetime Scott ‘sold more novels than all the other novelists of the time put together’; by the late 1860s he was still, ‘by several orders of magnitude, the author whose works had sold the largest number of copies in the English-speaking world’.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Butt, John and Tillotson, Kathleen, ‘The Topicality of Bleak House’, in their Dickens at Work (London: Methuen, 1957)Google Scholar
Robson, Catherine, ‘Historicizing Dickens’, in Palgrave Advances in Dickens Studies, ed. Patten, Robert and Bowen, John (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006); Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 269, 42nGoogle Scholar

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  • The historical novel
  • Edited by Sally Ledger, Birkbeck College, University of London, Holly Furneaux, University of Leicester
  • Book: Charles Dickens in Context
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975493.022
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  • The historical novel
  • Edited by Sally Ledger, Birkbeck College, University of London, Holly Furneaux, University of Leicester
  • Book: Charles Dickens in Context
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975493.022
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • The historical novel
  • Edited by Sally Ledger, Birkbeck College, University of London, Holly Furneaux, University of Leicester
  • Book: Charles Dickens in Context
  • Online publication: 05 August 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975493.022
Available formats
×