Global Dickens?

One of the schools that I interviewed for at MLA this past January has a “Global Shakespeare” course in its catalog. This was promising, I thought, since my work conceives of Victorian Studies as something that should be global in scope, if only to acknowledge that what made the Victorians who they were was their vast-reaching empire. Maybe this school would like a “Global Victorianist?” I thought to myself. No, no they would not, it seems.

In other news, as the Dickens’s World online conference put on by Wiley-Blackwell this week (3/7/12 and 3/8/12, though in some other time zone) goes on, I am currently thrilling to the themes in John Jordan’s essay “Global Dickens.” My first reaction was to fantasize about the course I could teach by the same name. Or better suited, “Postcolonial Dickens!” But such gut reactions are best quelled in this job market. Instead, I buckle down to consider in what ways it would be possible to conceive of Dickens globally and what kind of horizon such a configuration must have.

The article praises Professor Ada Nisbet for conceiving of Dickens as an artist whose work has achieved global significance and circulation. Jordan’s essay describes Nesbit’s ambitious project to create an international bibliography of Dickens Studies. The project, essentially a global reception study heartily limited by language, seems to have had a positively Casaubonian scope to it. Nesbit never finished it. Jordan accuses the postal system of slowly stifling the project and understates the point: Nesbit lacked adequate technology to complete the project.

My own concern, given my scholarly background, is Dickens in India. For sure, recording the reception of Dickens in India alone would have driven any scholar mad: Jordan writes, "The essay on 'Dickens in India' was especially anomalous, since it would have contained references to some 14 different languages spoken within the Indian subcontinent, including English." Oh right, that national language problem (just imagine the voting ballots). Also listed as an obstacle to the completion of the project: “appropriate contributors were difficult to find. India proved especially challenging, and Professor Nisbet was obliged to locate new researchers there as one prospective contributor after another declined or withdrew from the project.” One wonders what is meant by an “appropriate” contributor? Literary criticism looks very different in India than in North America; in my reading experience, what passes for literary criticism in India is far more erudite and historical (literary historical and biographical in flavor), far less theoretical or formalist (formalism having always already been limited by its European contours). Jordan does give a proper shout out to Priya Joshi’s archival work, but then I wonder, when will we finally stop pointing to Joshi’s work as exemplary because it’s finally been extended by other scholars?

I think the moral of this story, though Jordan does not overtly call for it, is to digitize this project, “Global Dickens.” Something like RaVoN.

In conclusion, this line from Jordan’s essay made me chuckle: “A Dickens Fellowship supposedly exists in Poona, although little evidence of its presence can be found.” Maybe Poona is where my tenure-track job is, too.