Catherine Waters

Commodity Culture in Dickens's Household Words

The Social Life of Goods

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In 1850, Charles Dickens founded Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain an ever-widening middle-class readership. Published in the decade following the Great Exhibition of 1851, the journal appeared at a key moment in the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. Alongside the more well-known fiction that appeared in its pages, Dickens filled Household Words with articles about various commodities-articles that raise wider questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services: in other words, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. At the same time, Household Words was itself a commodity. With marketability clearly in view, Dickens required articles for his journal to be 'imaginative,' employing a style that critics ever since have too readily dismissed as mere mannerism. Locating the journal and its distinctive handling of non-fictional prose in relation to other contemporary periodicals and forms of print culture, this book demonstrates the role that Household Words in particular, and the Victorian press more generally, played in responding to the developing world of commodities and their consumption at midcentury.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Routledge
• Seitenzahl: 194
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Oktober 2008
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 240mm x 161mm x 15mm
• Gewicht: 461g
• ISBN-13: 9780754655787
• ISBN-10: 0754655784
• Artikelnr.: 44788450

Autorenporträt

Catherine Waters is a senior lecturer in English at the University of New England (New South Wales). She is the author of Dickens and the Politics of the Family (1997) and various articles on Victorian fiction and journalism.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents: Introduction
Advertising fictions
The genuine article, the sham and the problem of authenticity
'The key of the street'
'Men made by machinery'
Worldly goods
'Trading in death'
'Fashion in undress'
Bibliography
Index.