Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination

Contemporary Review, Spring, 2008

Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination. Sally Ledger. Cambridge University Press. [pounds sterling]50.00 (US$90.00). xiii 295 pages. ISBN 978-0-521-84577-9. This book sets out to reveal the debts Dickens owed to the populist radical tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to the political satire of Thomas Spence, Wilkes, William Hone, Cobbett and Cruikshank.

The author examines this radical heritage by first looking at Peterloo and the Queen Caroline affair and then at the writings not just of Dickens but of Jerrold, Hone and various Chartist writers. She then examines the radical messages that permeate Oliver Twist, Dickens' relationship with Douglas Jerrold, the explosion in new populist newspapers and magazines in the 1840s, the years when Dickens was establishing himself, the position of Household Words as an outlet for Dickens' political views, and the flourishing of Dickens' brand of radicalism in the 1850s, e.g. Bleak House, Hard Times and Little Dorrit. Prof. Ledger makes her case but like so many modern academics she has difficulties with the Church: to refer to a clergyman as 'the Reverend' smacks rather more of the music hall than of the lecture room. (A.C.)