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Charles Dickens: Novelist, Journalist and Reformer

Module description

The module examines the career of probably the most successful and influential of all Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens. It focuses on the way his novels portrayed the dramatic changes in the social structure of industrial Britain from the 1840s-1870s, but also considers Dickens’s role as editor, journalist and celebrity within an expanding literary marketplace.

Module aims - intentions of the module

• Seminars will focus on a number of Dickens's major novels, including Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and A Tale of Two Cities, exploring social and literary issues such as comedy, class relations, criminality, sentimentality and melodrama, gender relations and sexuality, globalisation, modes of narration, the realist novel, and cityscapes.

• The module will also explore the evolution of Dickens's career as an exemplar of the changing role of the Victorian novelist and the growth of the literary marketplace. Seminars will draw on material from the University of Exeter Special Collections in order to explore Dickens's role as editor of Household Words and All the Year Round. Other topics to be discussed include Dickens's public readings and his literary celebrity, as well as his extensive journalistic output.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. Demonstrate a thorough understanding of the major novels of Charles Dickens and the evolution of his career as a novelist.
• 2. Demonstrate an informed appreciation of the social, cultural and political changes of the Victorian period, particularly the Condition-of-England question
• 3. Demonstrate an awareness of many of the key aesthetic, commercial, and political influences on the work of Charles Dickens

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 4. Demonstrate an advanced ability to analyse literary texts and to relate their concerns and modes of expression to their historical context
• 5. Demonstrate an advanced ability to interrelate texts and discourses specific to their own discipline with issues in the wider context of cultural and intellectual history
• 6. Demonstrate an advanced ability to understand and analyse relevant theoretical ideas, and to apply these ideas to literary texts.

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 7. Through seminar work and presentations, demonstrate advanced communication skills, and an ability to work both individually and in groups
• 8. Through essay-writing, demonstrate appropriate research and bibliographic skills, an advanced capacity to construct a coherent, substantiated argument, and a capacity to write clear and correct prose
• 9. Research for seminars, essays, and presentations demonstrate advanced proficiency in information retrieval and analysis
• 10. Through research and writing, demonstrate an advanced capacity to make critical use of secondary material, to question assumptions, and to reflect on their own learning process

Syllabus plan

Whilst the content may vary from year to year, it is envisioned that it will cover some or all of the following topics:
• Sketching London
• Crime, Melodrama and Artful Dodgering
• Christmas Books
• Fiction in the Market-place
• Editor, Journalist and Celebrity
• The Condition of England
• Bleak House and the Great Exhibition
• The Industrial City
• Writing Revolution: Adaptation and the Dickens Industry

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Re-assessment notes

Deferral – if you miss an assessment for certificated reasons judged acceptable by the Mitigation Committee, you will normally be either deferred in the assessment or an extension may be granted. The mark given for a re-assessment taken as a result of deferral will not be capped and will be treated as it would be if it were your first attempt at the assessment.

Referral – if you have failed the module overall (i.e. a final overall module mark of less than 40%) you will be required to submit a further assessment as necessary. If you are successful on referral, your overall module mark will be capped at 40%.

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

Basic reading:

• Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Penguin Classics, 2003)
• Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Penguin Classics, 2003)
• Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Penguin Classics, 2003)
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Penguin Classics, 2004)
• Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and other Christmas Writings (Penguin Classics, 2003)
• Charles Dickens, Hard Times (Penguin Classics, 2003)

A selection from Dickens's journalism and Sketches by Boz, together with related contextual readings will be made available on ELE.

Selected secondary texts:
• Holly Furneaux, Queer Dickens: Erotics, Families, Masculinities (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Sally Ledger, Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
• John Jordan, Robert Patten and Catherine Waters, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens (Oxford University Press, 2018)
• Daniel Tyler, ed. Dickens’s Style (Cambridge University Press, 2013)Juliet John, Dickens's villains: melodrama, character, popular culture (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• ELE – https://vle.exeter.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1902

Key words search

Dickens, Victorian, the city, industrial revolution, comedy, emotions, realism