In the years since Dickens first found fame as an author, his image has been used in many contexts, most suggestively as the
face, for over a decade, of the Bank of England’s ₤10 note.
1 Dickens’s image, like that of Charles Darwin which replaced his on the ₤10 note, was no doubt chosen to convey something
of Britain’s ‘greatness’, of a national heritage imparting solidity to the flimsiness of paper money. On the Dickens ₤10 note,
his image is superimposed on the nostalgic, ‘inimitably English’ scene from
The Pickwick Papers (1836–7): the Dingley Dell cricket match.
2 The Dickens ₤10 note captures much about the way in which Dickens’s image has been used posthumously by the heritage industry:
the note works to promote an association between Dickens and an idea of Englishness that combines cosy communality with reminders
of the ‘greatness’ of Britain’s past.
The phrase ‘the heritage industry’ was coined by Robert Hewison in his work of that name, and is widely used to refer to the
heritage sector in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
3 However, the idea of the Victorians as self-conscious engineers and pioneers of a political and commercial sense of national
and international ‘heritage’ is widely accepted. John Gardiner has written in engaging terms about the ways in which the Victorians,
notably Queen Victoria, ‘anticipated twentieth-century observers in their attitude to heritage’; his description of Victoria’s
servants as going through a ‘dress rehearsal for the “heritage industry” of today’ is more widely applicable to the role of
Victorians in the evolution of the heritage industry.
4 The Great Exhibition of 1851 is the most often discussed example of the Victorians as heritage makers. However, at every
level the Victorians ‘heritagised’ themselves, or self-consciously fashioned themselves as objects of a future historical
(and emotional) gaze.
5 To give just a few examples, in the sphere of cultural heritage, in 1889, William Gladstone established St Deiniol’s Library
in Hawarden, Flintshire – Britain’s only residential library – to house his 32,000 books
after his death. On the national political scene, Britain’s colonial activities were seen even in the nineteenth century as
a sign of power in the present and a legacy or inheritance to empower future (mainly British) generations. Victorian funerals
were, where possible, notoriously ostentatious and ritualised, displaying the same sublimation of the material into the spiritual
that characterises the heritage sensibility.
Moreover, if present-day nostalgia feeds, in Gardiner’s words, on ‘material artefacts and the recreative experience’, then
this attitude to objects, leisure and the past was not new in the post-Victorian era, but rather a product of the industrial
age.
6 Ordinary as well as extraordinary Victorians were steeped in the particular fetishisation of objects and buildings that underpins
the heritage industry. The middle classes, for example, fetishised their homes, treating them as display cabinets that spoke
of their wealth, social status and aspirations, as well as comprising their legacies. Steeped in an increasingly commercialised,
industrialised environment, the Victorians felt the need to create a sense of culture and heritage that eschewed the logic
of the market. It is thus no accident that they have come to occupy such a dominant position in the post-Victorian and particularly
popular perceptions of British ‘heritage’.
Dickens is central to both the British sense of heritage and to international perceptions of Britain and its heritage. Refining
Gordon Marsden’s view that ‘Charles Dickens is the Victorian era’, Gardiner claims that ‘Dickens in some ways is the key to
the Victorian age; “Dickensian” often illuminates “Victorian”, rather than vice-versa’.
7 This arguably has as much to do with his screen presence as with his books – Dickens’s works have spawned more film adaptations
than those of any other author.
8 The visual translation of Dickens on to the screen has boosted his importance to the tourist industry. In 1993 a visitor
survey conducted at Jane Austen’s house at Chawton asked respondents to ‘identify up to five British places which they linked
with specific writers’. Dickens was mentioned most of all – by 40 per cent of respondents – and ‘usually linked with London’.
9 Tourists go on ‘pilgrimages’ not simply to places with which Dickens himself is associated, but to buildings featured in
the fiction with ‘real’ antecedents, such as the Old Curiosity Shop. So embedded in the British cultural consciousness and
in the image of Britain abroad is the link between Dickens and London that the industry of books on Dickens and London (usually
‘Dickens’s London’) routinely argues, in Peter Ackroyd’s words, that ‘London created Dickens, just as Dickens created London’.
10What distinguishes Dickens from other literary authors whose impact transcends the literary is the extent to which he consciously
worked both
to found a ‘Dickens industry’ and, in his own words, to ‘lay the foundation of an endurable retrospect’.
11 It is not difficult to demonstrate the extent to which Dickens was the impetus behind the Dickens industry of his day; what
is perhaps more risky is to suggest that he literally willed the posthumous Dickens industry. Dickens’s will appears to suggest
a man who wanted the legacy of his books to speak for themselves, but other evidence suggests that he worked hard to control
the way in which he would be regarded by posterity. The destruction of letters relating to his mistress Ellen Ternan, and
the acquiescence of all his friends and acquaintances in this airbrushing, is perhaps the most well-known evidence of Dickens’s
attempt to exercise control over his afterlives.
A quirkier anecdote concerns the public sale, after Dickens’s death, of his (mainly domestic) belongings, which met with opposition
among many who no doubt found something distasteful about it. In a report in
Chambers’s Journal, though the reporter attempts to show support for the sale (claiming that ‘Charles Dickens was far too free-handed and generous
a man to die rich’), his distaste for the proceedings is apparent in the ambivalent conclusion that ‘No living Englishman
for certain, and perhaps no Englishman of the future, will ever see such a sale again’.
12 The public sale for money of the domestic belongings of England’s foremost author seemed in dubious taste in any case, but
especially so because the objects sold seemed to be second-rate – no
Pickwick manuscripts, but unimpressive pictures, drawings and art objects, as well as a model for Grip the raven from
Barnaby Rudge. What seemed most surprising is that Dickens had desired the sale. No doubt he wanted to raise money for his family from
the sale of such ‘artefacts’, as the article calls them. But the striking aspect of his desire for the sale is the implied
consciousness on Dickens’s part of the dynamics of the business of heritage, of his living consciousness that fame and posthumousness
could transform even the most vulgar of objects into artefacts and into money.
Objects are central to what could be called the heritage aesthetic ingrained in Dickens’s novels. Dickens had a peculiar materialist
sensibility that attributed life and value to objects and was conscious of the fetishisation of objects in his society. It
is well known that Dickens animates the inanimate in his poetics, and dehumanises the human. In terms of thing theory, there
is a doubleness in Dickens’s work whereby the poetics of the object both confirm and subvert the logic of capitalism. When
Ruskin declared that Dickens wrote ‘in a circle of stage fire’, he was touching on Dickens’s instincts not simply as a showman,
but as a salesman and an advertiser also.
13 The environment of a Dickens novel is,
however, some way between a shop and a museum. This is perhaps best symbolised by
The Old Curiosity Shop, which literally sells curious things; it contains ‘tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams’
(ch. 1), and is itself strange and dreamlike. In holding objects up for view, in announcing their status as anthropomorphic
spectacle, Dickens simultaneously places them in a glass case and intensifies their presence or ‘aura’.
14 The Dickens novel invests curious objects with emotional, cultural and economic value just as people and places are subject
to a peculiarly Dickensian objectification.
Self-conscious yet emotional framing permeates all Dickens’s re-presentations of buildings, people and places. A classic example
of Dickens’s heritage aesthetic is in the description of the Maypole inn that opens
Barnaby Rudge, a pre-urban idyll of Englishness that runs the gamut of heritage techniques – most notably, the framing of the past as Other
and the inclusion of details about place/distance to suggest authenticity – and thereby announces its constructedness. The
attitude of the inn’s ‘customers’ to its historical artefacts lays bare the tangential and superstitious relationship between
objects and stories in our consumption of history, emphasising that both heritage and history involve storytelling and a willed
fetishisation of objects. The ‘oak-panelled room’ in which Queen Elizabeth is said to have slept and the ‘mounting block’
on which she is said to have stepped are invested with their own lives and histories by ‘true believers’ but are viewed as
‘rather apocryphal’ by ‘matter-of-fact and doubtful folks’ (ch. 1). Whereas Gardiner argues that ‘The cost of “heritage” …
is a highly selective view of history’, Dickens’s sceptical view suggests that history itself is highly selective and, as
John Bowen argues, irrational.
15 Here and elsewhere, however, a critique of fantasy is attended by an appreciation of its power and pervasiveness in the construction
of our histories, communities and national identities.
The purposeful dwelling on what, in the preface to
Bleak House, Dickens calls ‘the romantic side of familiar things’ plays an important part in the heritage aesthetic. The investment of
the home with romance, with almost sacred significance, is closely associated with Dickens and his writings.
16 The home is routinely considered an especially important physical relic of posthumous celebrities, although what is fascinating
about Dickens is the way in which he himself fictionalised or fetishised his own homes, self-consciously investing them with
nostalgia. Homesick for Devonshire Terrace on his first visit to America, for instance, he effuses: ‘Oh for Jack Straw’s!
Oh for Jack! oh for Topping! – oh for Charley, Mamey, Katey – the study, the Sunday’s dinner, the anything and everything
connected
with our life at Home!’
17 Writing to Felton of his summer seaside home at Broadstairs in Kent, Dickens frames both the scene and an image of himself
very deliberately:
There is a little fishing-place; intensely quiet; built on a cliff whereon – in the centre of a tiny semicircular bay – our
house stands: the sea rolling and dashing under the windows … In a bay-window in a one pair, sits from nine o’Clock to one,
a gentleman with rather long hair and no neck-cloth who writes and grins as if he thought he were very funny indeed. His name
is Boz.
18
Dickens’s description enacts a seaside picture postcard. The writer of Sketches by Boz (1839) and Pictures from Italy (1846) is aware of his own habit of picturing scenes, as he is of his self-mythologising.
Dickens’s heritage framing of particular places and buildings has attracted tourists to England ever since his death. Yet
he is at his best when describing not idylls but the vivid squalor, the corrupted plenitude of city life. It is this side
of Victorian life that lends the adjectives ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Victorian’ their negative associations. Dickens does not simply
represent urban deprivation: he exhibits it. The descriptions of London in Bleak House and Oliver Twist – and Marseilles in Little Dorrit – announce themselves as grand, filmic productions, moving panoramas that set the scene from a distance to begin with, then
home in on detail, mayhem and multiplicity. In Oliver Twist we are positioned as tourists, literally led to Jacob’s Island: ‘To reach this place’, the narrator/guide explains, ‘the
visitor has to penetrate through a maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets’ (ch. 50).
The fact that Dickens is widely associated in the popular consciousness with the idea of Englishness is largely a result of
the simultaneous commodification and romanticising of place evident in his heritage aesthetic. The tendency of received ideas
of Dickens and Victorian England to erase the memory of the commercial Dickens beneath that of the uncommercial Dickens is
typical of the heritage industry more generally, which works in repressed opposition to ideas of commodification and materialism.
The traditional idea of ‘heritage Dickens’, for example – promoted most obviously in traditional BBC costume dramas – has
tended to repress Dickens’s commercialism and modernity. It is partly because it reverses the tendency in the heritage industry
to repress materialism and ‘Other’ the Victorians that ‘Dickens World’ – the multimillion-pound entertainment site opened
in 2007 in Chatham, Kent – has attracted so much media hostility. If ancestry and heritage involve an idea of value residing
in veneration, in an emotional relationship between the past and the
present that is nonetheless hierarchical, then the accessibility and playfulness of Dickens World breaks the bonds of ancestry.
A vital component of the heritage industry is nostalgia, an emotionally infused view of the past that serves a present need
for feelings of wholeness, belief and simplicity. As David Lowenthal puts it, heritage ‘is not an inquiry into the past but
a celebration of it, not an effort to know what actually happened but a profession of faith in a past tailored to present-day
purposes’.
19A Christmas Carol (1843) has been the most adapted, widely disseminated and commercially successful of all Dickens’s works, and has established
a ‘heritage’ image of a quintessentially Victorian Dickens who elevated feelings and people above money and commodities. It
is fascinating, therefore, that A Christmas Carol in fact holds a mirror up as much to the intrinsic connection between our emotional needs and our commercial environment
as to their opposition. It is popular not simply because it offers ‘redemption’ for those corrupted by materialism, but because
it acknowledges the urban, commercial context of that materialism and the emotional needs it creates. One of those needs is
for something more than the material or the monetary; another is the need to revisit the past and to transform it, to sublimate
it as a salve to present conflicts. It is perhaps because A Christmas Carol dramatises and anatomises the dialectical structure of feeling underlying the heritage sensibility that it has become such
an important object of that sensibility. It is not only a sentimental Carol; it offers a re-presentation of the dynamics of sentimentality, nostalgia, longing and desire. It upholds an apparently simple
ideal of Christmas that transcends material values, at the same time that it shows the effort of will necessary to summon
and believe in such a vision.
Despite its complex relationship to commodity culture and the riches it has generated through the ages, A Christmas Carol has enshrined Dickens as an icon of benevolence and selflessness. That it has done so captures the dynamics of the heritage
mentality at its purest and most paradoxical. The image of the uncommercial Dickens is testimony to an ongoing modern need
to sublimate money matters in the cultural heritage sphere.