" Victorian fiction has been read and analyzed from a wide range
of perspectives in the past century. But how did the novelists
themselves read and respond to each other's creations when they
first appeared? Jerome Meckier answers that intriguing question in
this ground-breaking study of what he terms the Victorian realism
wars. Meckier argues that nineteenth-century British fiction should
be seen as a network of intersecting reactions and counteractions
in which the novelists rethought and rewrote each other's novels as
a way of enhancing their own credibility. In an increasingly
relative world, thanks to the triumph of a scientific secularity,
the goal of the novelist was to establish his or her own
credentials as a realist, hence a reliable social critic, by
undercutting someone else's -- usually Charles Dickens's. Trollope,
Mrs. Gaskell, and especially George Eliot attempted to make room
for themselves in the 1850s and 1860s by pushing Dickens aside.
Wilkie Collins tried a different form of parodic revaluation: he
strove to outdo Dickens at the kind of novel Dickens thought he did
best, the kind his other rivals tried to cancel, tone down, or
repair, ostensibly for being too melodramatic but actually for
expressing too negative a world view. For his part, Dickens --
determined to remain inimitable -- replied to all of his rivals by
redoing them as spiritedly as they had reused his characters and
situations to make their own statements and to discredit his. Thus
Meckier redefines Victorian realism as the bravura assertion by a
major novelist (or one soon to be) that he or she was a better
realist than Dickens. By suggesting the ways Victorian novelist
read and rewrote each other's work, this innovative study alters
present day perceptions of such double-purpose novels as Felix
Holt, Bleak House, Middlemarch, North and South, Hard Times, The
Woman in White, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
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