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THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

Released Friday, 22nd March 2024
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THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Charles Dickens

Friday, 22nd March 2024
Good episode? Give it some love!
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about Charles Dickens and his condition-of-England novel Hard Times. I discuss Dickens’s successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwardly mobile origin, his literary celebrity, and his personal scandals; Dickens’s afterlife as an influence and counter-influence on the development of both the elite and the popular novel; the importance to Dickens (and to the whole of modern literature and politics) of the Victorian Sage Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyle’s influence on the emergence of both socialism and fascism; the Victorian problems of utilitarianism, individualism, and revolutionism Dickens identifies in Hard Times; the solutions to these problems the novel proposes, including reformism, sentimentality, domesticity, Christianity, and fancy; and the novel’s utopian horizon, as against Carlylean fascism-socialism or sentimental reformism, located in the potentially universal déclassé space of the circus and theater whose form the dramatic Dickensian novel imitates. The first 25 minutes, which include a scorching denunciation of didacticism in the art museum, are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.

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