In 1847 Dickens was a world-famous author raking in profits from serial novels and Christmas books. At that time he wrote several versions of his earlier life, attempting to explain to himself and his vast public how he had transformed himself from an ill-educated boy sent to work at the age of twelve in a shoe-blacking factory into the toast of European letters. The inauguration of a cheap edition of his novels provided an opportunity to write new prefaces accounting for each work’s origin. For Pickwick Papers, his second title (1836-37) and first novel, he disclosed the beginning of his vocation as writer. William Hall, formerly a bookseller and in 1836 the partner of Edward Chapman in a modest publishing firm, arrived at Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn on 10 February 1836 with a proposal for the young author, known for his street sketches and tales published under the pseudonym “Boz.” It was to supply letterpress accompanying etched illustrations by the comic artist Robert Seymour, some of which had already been prepared to illustrate the story Seymour had in mind.

In Hall, Dickens reported, he recognized

The scholar or student who wishes to elucidate Spenser's relations with the vernacular poetry of his time finds a curious unevenness in the received views. Spenser's career began with his participation in A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), an English version of the visionary anthology Het theatre oft Toon-neel by the Dutch poet Jan van der Noot. His debut as 'our new Poete' came in The Shepheardes Calender (1579), where two late medieval or early Renaissance figures, the English poet John Skelton and the French poet Clément Marot, are prominent influences, fused in the figure of Colin Clout. The Complaints, a loose collection of nine pieces 'containing sundrie small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie' formerly 'disperst abroad in sundrie hands', are closely modelled on the work of Joachim Du Bellay, while Spenser's sonnet sequence, the Amoretti, depends on that of Philippe Desportes. For the epic purposes of The Faerie Queene Spenser is assumed to participate in a continuum that reaches back first to Lodovico Ariosto and then to Matteo Maria Boiardo, with the Portuguese Luis de Camães as a latter-day precursor. Each phase of his career, then, has its own track of established influences, but these are seldom argued to extend past their immediate sphere – Spenser's Camões, for instance, is always an epic, and never a lyric, poet. Nor are the implications of such a staggered set of models followed to obvious conclusions. Why, we might ask, is an Englishman who can read Italian, French and Portuguese with a poet's penetration not assumed to read Spanish as well? While the immediate result of this uneven pattern of what is called influence is a certain lack of flexibility in literary history's presentation of his career, the more serious consequence is that a Spenser so remorselessly divided can scarcely be thought of as a European poet. And so, as it happens, Spenser is not. Instead he comes to us constructed as perhaps the most English of early modern poets.

The title of this chapter presumably does not puzzle its readers, but its complications should be spelled out. In its earliest English uses, 'influence' (from Latin influere, to flow in) is an astrological term, referring to the way emanations from heavenly bodies affect human affairs. Human beings can be metaphorically represented as having such powers. As a term of literary study, 'influence' also draws on the image of flowing water, which is central to its Latin meaning. Spenser's best-known references to Chaucer use this image. In The Faerie Queene (IV, ii, 32) he calls him 'well [i.e. spring, source] of English vndefyled'; Spenser's pastoral alter ego, Colin Clout, conscious of his distance from his dead predecessor, imagines that he could be eloquent'if on me some little drops would flowe / Of that the spring was in his learned hedde' (SC, 'June', 93-4). Traditional studies of a poet's influence engage both these metaphors. Nineteenthcentury philology emphasised 'source study', tracking down to their origins specific details of phrasing, plotting, or representation, as if following a stream to its head. At the same time, major poets could be viewed as having broad, as if more than earthly, powers in relation to their successors. Responding to this double understanding of influence, the articles on later poets in The Spenser Encyclopedia record specific imitations, borrowings and allusions, but also seek to identify broad and fundamental ways in which the later poet's work shows that s/he has felt the power of Spenser's.

'Classical traditions' is a less than appealing title. In fact, the phrase conjures up a whole gallery of misery: an unhealthy subservience to Virgil, Ovid, Homer and the rest, an unquestioning regard for the authority of antiquity, a failure to value individual creativity, and a lack of responsiveness to the immediate pressures of the present. What could be worse?

Spenser's response to classical traditions is usually exempted from these strictures. His eighteenth-century admirers often characterise his response to his reading as dreamily eclectic, in a manner which enabled him to make something entirely his own out of his classical reading. He is also often said to have lacked a very precise understanding of the classics. Thomas Greene, for example, suggests that Spenser lacks the awareness of anachronism - that is, a sense of how his culture differs from that of ancient Rome - which was the central emerging element in the ways Renaissance poets responded to their classical predecessors. In The Faerie Queene, Greene claims, 'historical self-consciousness seems sporadic and dim'. The chief aim of this chapter is to destroy once and for all this vision of Spenser as a happy anachronist, and to show how Spenser responded in highly sophisticated ways both to the complexities of his classical originals and to the uncertainties of his time. From the interplay of these two forces Spenser generates some of his most subtle and topical writing.

Edmund Spenser lived during an era of chronic religious anxiety. He was born at about the time of the accession to the throne of Mary I (1553-8), the Catholic queen who attempted to reverse Henry VIII's schism from the Church of Rome and the Protestant religious settlement of her late brother, Edward VI (1547-53). Too young to remember Wyatt's Rebellion (1554), which triggered persecutions that earned the queen her reputation as 'Bloody Mary', Spenser would compose lines that allude at some level to burnings of Protestant heretics: 'holy Martyrs often doen to dye, / With cruell malice and strong tyranny' (FQ, I, viii, 36). Surely he read sensational accounts of religious persecution in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days (1563), known popularly as the Book of Martyrs. The most influential book of its age, other than the English Bible, that monumental collection exerted a profound influence upon the formation of English Protestant identity and nationhood.

Coming of age under Elizabeth I (1558-1603), the poet served the Virgin Queen who attempted to resolve religious discord with an ecclesiastical settlement that fused Catholic ritualism with codification of Protestant theology in the 'Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion' (1563). For hundreds of years, patriotic citizens celebrated the 17 November, the anniversary of her sister's death and her own Accession Day, as a national triumph over Catholicism.

Dickens and theatre? It comes down to what you might mean by “and.” If you mean something like: could Dickens come into the theater as a participant, I'd say, certainly not. Oh yes, he tried. But early on he found he couln't. And thereafter he didn't.

That may seem surprising. Dickens is by every standard account the most theatrical of Victorian novelists. This Companion would be thought considerably less companionable if it lacked a chapter on Dickens and theatre (though perhaps not this chapter on Dickens and theatre). All his life Dickens paid fierce, unremitting attention to other people’s plays and to other people’s performances. What he saw he regularly purloined, and then transformed into fiction. He probably knew as much about the practical work of theaters as anyone working on a nineteenth-century stage. (Here I should point out that, following the practice in theatre studies, I am spelling as theatre anything like a playhouse, particularly a professional playhouse, and as theater, the practice or theory of performance.) Acting obsessed him. He supported actors experiencing financial hard times and even dreamed of the great actor Macready as his desirable double. His novels were quickly adapted to the stage, not just as they appeared, but, through the vagaries of serial publication, often even before they appeared (in book form).

The novels Charles Dickens wrote in the 1850s, with their capacious social canvases and their voice of social reform, seem to invite readings of their political message. No less so does the career of Dickens himself in that energetic decade, when one nonconformist preacher claimed, “There have been at work among us three great social agencies: the London City Mission; the novels of Mr. Dickens; the cholera.” Dickens’s wide-ranging undertakings in both speeches and the pages of the journal Household Words, which he founded in 1850 (undertakings which included his earnest discussions of sanitation reform, prostitution, and the need for protection of authors and their copyright) made him a powerful public figure. However, recent accounts have stressed that his private life was lived almost as obsessively in the public eye: the growing discontent with his ever-increasing family; his painful encounter with his former sweetheart, Maria Beadnell, now a nervous and foolish middle-aged woman; the meeting with the young actress, Ellen Ternan; and the decision to separate from his wife Catherine, which he announced in the pages of Household Words. In all this flurry of social and erotic activity, it has been hard to focus on the real and complicated achievements of the novels of this decade, when Dickens was to command his greatest sales and to reach a wider sphere of commitment in all of his literary endeavors.

During the course of their discussion of Irish customs in A View of the Present State of Ireland, Irenius informs Eudoxus that

As the execution of Murrogh O'Brien occurred in 1577 the passage has long been used as evidence for Spenser's presence in Ireland some three years before his officially documented arrival in 1580 as secretary to Lord Arthur Grey, the newly appointed Lord Deputy. But this is to make unwarranted assumptions about the relationship between Irenius and Spenser.

This essay attempts to understand the purport of these two citations in their contexts. In an essay published in 1971 as the introduction to the Penguin edition of Bleak House and reprinted a number of times since then, I argued that Bleak House is a document about the interpretation of documents. Now I have been asked to turn back to this novel to see what I make of it today. This essay is in response to that demand. I rejoice in the chance to do that. Bleak House is a wonderful novel, almost inexhaustibly rich, perhaps even unfathomably so.

Nor have other scholars and critics failed to respond to the demand this splendid novel makes for the generation of more words about its words. Since my essay of 1971 was published, a large number of further essays and books have been written on Bleak House. These essays have added greatly to my understanding of Bleak House and to our collective understanding.

By accident and by design, Dickens effectively determined the shape, pace, structure, and texture of his own novel form, and developed both professional and aesthetic expectations of the writer and reader in the production and reception of his work. He made the novel what it was for the Victorians, creating and managing an appetite for fictions that would in turn make both imaginative and social demands. Throughout his career, the arts of the storyteller, the deferral tactics of the Arabian Nights, the capacity of the journalist to observe and report, the power of the satirist for reform and of the clown or tragedian to move an audience were brought into play, not despite the constraints of part-publication, but actually by exploiting serial form.

Novels in parts, whether separate volumes or shorter units, were not unknown in the eighteenth century, but it was Dickens with Pickwick Papers in 1836 who brought part-publication to such success that it became the dominant pattern for the novel through most of the Victorian period. This was Dickens’s first novel, but not his first work. He was a practiced writer, the author of Sketches by Boz, when Chapman and Hall asked him to supply the text for a publication in monthly numbers to accompany a series of etchings by Robert Seymour.

While Wilfred Owen, the English First World War poet, was recovering from shell shock at the 13th Casualty Clearing Station in Amiens, France, he wrote to his mother, describing a pleasant spring day out in the nearby countryside. Owen carefully contrasted the horror of the 'whiz-bangs and machine guns' to the delight of rural France by recalling a significant literary memory:

The fact that the letter refers to Arthur, Lancelot and Avalon, and to an episode that does not feature in Spenser's poem, means that Owen was undoubtedly thinking of Malory's Morte D'Arthur rather than The Faerie Queene.

The recent turn towards historicist criticism in Spenser studies, exemplified by the fashion for placing the poet in an Irish context, has inhibited studies of a more formal kind. Critics like S. K. Heninger and Jean Brink have tried to rein in readers bent on contextualising Spenser to death. The last major work on Spenser's language was Herbert Sugden's The Grammar of Spenser's Faerie Queene, first published in 1936 and reissued thirty years later. Sugden's findings - that Spenser's style was cramped by his approach to poetic diction, his desire to enhance poetic language, the limitations of theme and the constraints of his chosen verse form - have found general acceptance. In her contribution to The Spenser Encyclopedia Barbara Strang pointed out the paradox that despite universal acknowledgement of Spenser's facility for language, this aspect of his work 'has received practically no attention during the last thirty years, when items for the Spenser bibliography have been pouring off the presses at an average rate of three a week'.It is a measure of the richness and complexity of the subject that Strang's comprehensive entry on this topic is supplemented by separate essays on dialect, etymology, glossing, morphology and syntax, names, neologisms, pronunciation, puns, rhyme and versification. The problem is that all of these features overlap.

As the editorial manifesto he wrote in 1850 to accompany the first number of Household Words indicates, Dickens had always aspired “to live in the Household affections, and to be numbered among the Household thoughts” of his readers. He saw himself as a prophet of the hearth, and his contemporaries hailed his reputation as the purveyor of cozy domestic bliss. As a reviewer of David Copperfield in Fraser’s Magazine wrote, “There is not a fireside in the kingdom where the cunning fellow has not contrived to secure a corner for himself as one of the dearest, and, by this time, one of the oldest friends of the family.” This reviewer attributes Dickens’s widespread popularity to “his deep reverence for the household sanctities, his enthusiastic worship of the household gods.” Yet despite this reputation as the prophet of domestic bliss, any close examination of Dickens’s novels reveals very few portraits of happy and harmonious families. According to George Newlin, a statistical analysis of the novels yields 149 full orphans, 82 with no father, and 87 with no mother, making a total of 318 full or partial orphans: “only fifteen named characters we deem significant in the major works (novels and Christmas Books) had or have two parents, and in nearly half of these cases their families today would be considered dysfunctional.”

When Elizabeth Tudor was seven months old, she was displayed naked to the French ambassador and two other special envoys, so they might see and report that the marriage of the King of England and his new queen had been sanctioned by the birth of a child who was free from physical deformity. During the early decades of her reign, the Spanish ambassadors bribed Elizabeth's laundresses so that they might know if she had regular menstrual cycles. When the second round of French marriage negotiations began in 1579 (the queen was then 45 years old), Lord Burghley consulted her female servants and physicians in an effort to determine whether she was still capable of bearing children (he decided that she was). Attention to the monarch's body, to even its most intimate functions, was nothing new in early modern Europe. When that body was female, however, the scrutiny was different in kind.

The powers ascribed to male and female were asymmetrical in sixteenthcentury law, in sixteenth-century physiology, in sixteenth-century social life; when a female prince inherited the throne of England, she constituted both a practical and a representational crisis. The state was considered to hold a large proprietary interest in sexuality and procreation. Female chastity was the bearer of formidable ideological and practical significance; it was the indispensable guarantor of social coherence, legitimate title and the orderly maintenance and transfer of material wealth, including land tenure.

'Who knowes not Colin Clout?' asks The Faerie Queene (1596), nodding to the renown of its own author and his poetic alter ego. As posed here, near the conclusion of what was to be the final book of Spenser's epic and the greatest poetic achievement of the sixteenth century, this is surely meant as a rhetorical question. But rhetorical in what way exactly? Does the remark bespeak the bravado of ambition realised, of a career successfully accomplished? Or is it a presage of fame, pointing towards a horizon of celebrity and its rewards: that is, an aspiration not quite yet, but perhaps now at last about to be attained? Or does the rhetorical cast of the query - embedded in the poem's narrative as a parenthetical aside: 'Poor Colin Clout (who knowes not Colin Clout?)' (VI, X, 16)1 - mask a more fraught gesture of selfpromotion, one borne of the concern that there may indeed still be those who know not Colin Clout, or, in any event, have yet to prize 'Poor Colin' according to his real worth? What does it mean, we should further inquire, that Spenser does not proffer this question from a secure position within or even near Elizabeth's court, the putative epicentre of the courtly values and virtues his nationalistic epic celebrates, and, as a cynosure of elite cultural activity, the seemingly natural home for a poet who presents himself as the nation's laureate? Instead, Spenser's query issues from the outposts of the kingdom, from the 'wilds' of Ireland, where he spent most of the last twenty years of his life pursuing, in tandem with his poetic career, another career as a colonial official and a planter.

If cinema, born 1895, was the child of Victorian visual technology and the entrancement of the eye, then the Victorian novel stood it god-parent. Its direct ancestors were the photograph, the panorama, and the magic lantern; the circus and the melodramatic theatre; the railway, which turned the world into “moving pictures”and opened up touristic pleasures; the ghoulish waxwork and the tableau vivant; and the overwhelming, kinetic city. But it was from fiction that film inherited its mass audience, its social function, its plots, and its techniques of narration. And from no other author did film inherit so much as from the Victorian writer who most imaginatively absorbed the influences of those other ancestors: Charles Dickens.

Since 1897, when the Mutoscope Company put the Death of Nancy Sykes [sic] on the screen, more films have been made of works by Dickens than of any other author’s: there are 130 Dickens films on record and only Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde beat out Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol (of which there are 30-plus versions each) for the status of most-filmed single fiction in history. Part of Dickens’s lure is the childhood appeal of his fiction, along with the “Inimitable’s” proto-modern celebrity status, and the sheer familiarity of the texts, reinforced by frequent theatrical adaptation; part derives from the “mythic” characters who – like the film stars of Hollywood’s golden age – seem larger than the stories that contain them. The attraction is partly economic: all of Dickens’s fictions were out of copyright by 1920. It speaks both of national identity and of international appeal and interpretive openness.

When Proust announced to Marie Nordlinger in December of 1899 that he had begun working on something different from what he usually did, dealing with Ruskin and certain cathedrals, he could scarcely have imagined upon what a long road he was embarking, or where it would lead him. Perhaps without realising it, he had closed the early period of his literary apprenticeship and begun a new era in which he would exercise his talents as a critic and translator, rather than as a creative writer. Before this second period was completed, Proust would publish two translations of Ruskin's works, and various articles and reviews about him. Though it might seem that this labour of erudition was a detour from his main path as a writer, and though he often chafed under the constraints it imposed on his creative imagination, it was in fact his Ruskin work that paradoxically led him to the discovery of a form for the narrative he was later to write, A la recherche du temps perdu.

Proust had made his literary début in 1893 with the publication of Les Plaisirs et les jours, a collection of texts that were largely traditional in form, cast in the classical and symbolist moulds he had inherited from his immediate literary predecessors. When he later embarked upon writing a novel, he again tried to shape it within the framework of conventional nineteenth-century forms, the autobiographical novel and the Bildungsroman, or novel of growth and self-discovery. It seems likely that the reason he never finished this narrative (published posthumously under the title Jean Santeuil) was his dissatisfaction with its structure.