Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey (1961) is a book by Steven Marcus.
Marcus's first scholarly monograph, Dickens: From Pickwick to Dombey, used psychoanalytic and mythological frameworks to analyze seven of Dickens's then neglected early novels. Marcus's arguments would prove exceptionally influential, including claims that the master-concept of Nicholas Nickleby was a hostility to "prudence"; that the abstract principle governing Dombey and Son was resistance to change and temporal decay; that Sam Weller cagily subverts the idealizing morality of Mr. Pickwick; and that Oliver Twist makes its most incisive political indictments through "satiric innocence," or a position of non-partisan humanity. Though immediately recognized as an eminent work of Dickens criticism, From Pickwick to Dombey was widely criticized for an over-reliance on Freudian concepts, a tendency that academic reviewers called "facile," "deeply flawed," and, according to Barbara Hardy, "rigidly orthodox" and "tactless." The New York Times review praised Marcus for connecting the “glaring faults of staginess and sentimentality” in Dickens’s fiction to the “deep wounds in his personal life.”
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