Placing the works of Charles Dickens and Walter Benjamin in
conversation with one another, Gillian Piggott argues that the two
writers display a shared vision of modernity. Her analysis of their
works shows that both writers demonstrate a decreased confidence in
the capacity to experience truth or religious meaning in an
increasingly materialist world and that both occupy similar
positions towards urban modernity and its effect upon experience.
Piggott juxtaposes her exploration of Benjamin's ideas on allegory
and messianism with an examination of Dickens's The Old Curiosity
Shop, arguing that both writers proffer a melancholy vision of a
world devoid of space and time for religious experience, a state of
affairs they associate with the onset of industrial capitalism. In
Benjamin's The Arcades Project and Dickens's Sketches by Boz and
Tale of Two Cities, among other works, the authors converge in
their hugely influential treatments of the city as a site of
perambulation, creativity, memory, and autobiography. At the same
time, both authors relate to the vertiginous, mutable, fast-paced
nature of city life as involving a concomitant change in the
structure of experience, an alteration that can be understood as a
reduction in the capacity to experience fully. Piggott's persuasive
analyses enable a reading of Dickens as part of a European,
particularly a German, tradition of thinkers and writers of
industrialization and modernity. For both Dickens and Benjamin,
truth appears only in moments of revelation, in fragments of
modernity.
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