10/05/2026
Dickens in VLC!
It’s wonderful to see no fewer than three – three! – articles grappling with Dickens’s work in exciting ways in the latest issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (that’s volume 54, issue 1).
Kevin Ohi’s “Disappointing Great Expectations” shows how disappointment stops Pip as character from lining up with Pip as narrator, in a fascinating reading of the emergence of consciousness and narration.
Mark Celeste’s “Prosthetic Networks: Sea Shanties and the Maritime Forms of the Victorian Novel” studies how differently able secondary characters use shanties to arrange and move other bodies around them in Dombey and Son and Our Mutual Friend, alongside Treasure Island. Under-served fans of Silas Wegg, weigh anchor! (N.B. Mark is a familiar face at the Dickens Universe, having joined us in 2014 to read Our Mutual Friend and in 2016 for Dombey and Son - experiences that laid the groundwork for this article.)
Johana Godfrey’s “Fraudulent Unearthing: Working Class Antiquaries in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend” considers how some of Dickens’s vagrant, poor, and laboring characters model different relationships to the material remnants of the past, trading historical accuracy for narrative authority and becoming essential to Dickens’s construction of plot.
There’s a lot to dig into for Dickens readers of many stripes. We really recommend giving all three a read, if you can: online through Cambridge University Press (Ohi’s and Godfrey’s are freely available!), through your local library, or via your institution if you belong to one. And of course, congratulations to professors Celeste, Godfrey, and Ohi, and thanks to everyone at Victorian Literature and Culture.
Victorian Literature and Culture
