Abstract

ABREU, Georgina. Charles Dickens and the Popular Radical Tradition. Diacrítica [online]. 2012, vol.26, n.2, pp.420-431. ISSN 0807-8967.

Was Charles Dickens a radical writer? This question has received a certain amount of critical attention. In her 2007 work Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination Sally Ledger, for example, argues that Dickens draws on the traditions of popular radical satire and melodrama, and traces the influence of Regency radicals on his novels, from William Hone to William Cobbett. In this essay I contend, however, that Dickens’s novels are far from being the descendents of a popular radical tradition, either satirical or melodramatic. No matter the powers of observation and imagination, present in the Dickensian fictional world, or his liberal views and reformist endeavours, there is not enough of the confrontational, counter cultural attitude and the delighted exploitation of ridicule towards authority which constitute the identity marks of the writings of Regency radicals such as William Hone and William Cobbett.

Keywords : radical; popular radicalism; confrontational; counter-cultural.

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