Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David, eds. Contemporary Dickens. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-8142-0285-2. Price: US$49.95

It has now become professional as well as popular commonsense to say that Charles Dickens is our contemporary. In the words of the website “The Dickens Project,” Dickens’s “concern with social and environmental issues…makes him very much a writer for our own time, partly because he is so much a writer of his own time.” Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David, the editors of Contemporary Dickens, agree. They argue that the special appeal of Dickens, that “great precursor of Modernity” in “the popular consciousness and the literary tradition,” both “English” and “international,” is due to “his having himself personally ruminated upon so many of the social problems, values, and ways of knowing that currently engross us” (1). Contemporary Dickens takes the pervasive presentism of this approach not as a problem for criticism—there is no hint that it might be—but as an opportunity for fresh thinking. Through new writing on Dickens their volume aims to “disclose the nineteenth-century origins of many of those issues which currently absorb us” (2). As Deborah Epstein Nord reminds us in her chapter, Dickens was not always the “brilliant and prescient literary figure” he has now become. Modernists generally regarded him as the author of “sentimental, undisciplined fictions” (264). To stand up for Dickens as a great novelist in the 1920s was to put one’s aesthetic judgement on the line. No longer: today it is de rigeur to pair him with Jane Austen, as Lionel Trilling did in 1952, as one of “the two greatest novelists of England” (265). Gillooly and David want to go further. They point to Dickens’s important contributions as “novelist, reformer, activist, ethicist, psychologist, anthropologist, and biographical subject—in the critical reassessments being undertaken across the disciplines” (3). Not shy of making triumphalist claims for his own work, it would surely be one more feather in Dickens’s cap that he should be seen posthumously to anticipate our current woes, while accommodating a half-century of shifts and turns in academic fashions. The question remains as to whether the excellent assembled essays in Contemporary Dickens support this hyperbolic assessment. The collection makes its most extended case for Dickens as a contributor to ethical debate. George Levine opens this topic with a thoughtful, broadly-based meditation on secularism and the Victorian novel. Levine distinguishes between the ways in which nineteenth-century scientific discovery put pressure on religious explanation, while the developing secular epistemology of the novel form leads it to “resist the pressures of the moral and sometimes explicitly religious energies that drive the narrative” (14). An illuminating reading of Little Dorrit (1855-57) elaborates on these tensions and paradoxes. Triggered by Levine’s alarm that the healthy scepticism of the Victorians is going out of fashion, the essay confines current debates on secularity to the footnotes. Continuing the theme of the secular and the sacred in “Dickens and the Goods,” Robert Newsom explores the competing and combining influences of Utilitarianism, its critics, and varieties of Victorian Christianity on the “ethical force” of Dickens’s judgemental style (36). This contextual material is suggestive, but a scattershot of examples only confirms Dickens’s eclecticism and inconsistency in relation to it. Newsom’s failure to comment on the ethics of his opening example, a light-hearted early sketch announcing Dickens’s detestation of the “red-headed and red-whiskered Jews” of the Holywell Street second-hand clothing trade does not auger well for an analysis that makes no distinction between “ethical and moral” judgements, and pays scant lip service to twenty-first century relevance (35). Using Bleak House (1852-53) as her central text, Nancy Yousef argues that Dickens’s fiction “exposes crucial problems within ethical theories” of sympathy and the moral sense …