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The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination
An exploration of the strange poetry of Dickens' imagination by leading academic and critic John Carey. Setting aside the usual interpretations of Dickens' work, The Violent Effigy delves into the wonderful, terrible fantasy world it inhabited. It shows Dickens torn between the appeal of violence and a fanatical he was attracted by characters who commit murder or burst into flame or want to eat one another, but also required people soaped and regimented. The children he created were either the pious gnomes beloved of Victorian readers or callous, sharp-nosed children who pick out adults by the odd personal atmospheres they carry around. Among his females are mythic women whose insidious miniature weapons - needles, scissors - threaten the dominant male. He created a shadow-land between life and death, peopled by effigies, walking coffins, waxworks, stuffed creatures and disturbingly animated corpses. John Carey skilfully shows how Dickens demolished Victorian shams, while keeping at bay the terrors of his fantasy. He celebrates, above all, Dickens' peculiar genius for renewing the world by the curious lights he saw in it.
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First published December 11, 2008
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May 7, 2018
The violent effigy is an unsentimental critical analysis of Dickens' ouvre, organized thematically in a scholarly, though accesible, language.
Dr. Carey sets out to demolish certain commonly held beliefs about Dickens. For example, Dickens is generally thought to have been a wise and humane social thinker and visionary. However, Dr. Carey reminds us that he was a champion of capital punishment, thought Negro suffrage preposterous, recommended imprisonment for bad language, flogging for bigamy and, to top it all, was a passionate sexist. With his eye on sales, argues Dr. Carey, Dickens was prepared to patronize and sentimentalize without restraint. His brilliant analysis of little Nell's death illustrates just this with mordant humour.
This book is a wittily subversive study of a very revered author of the english "tradition".
Dr. Carey sets out to demolish certain commonly held beliefs about Dickens. For example, Dickens is generally thought to have been a wise and humane social thinker and visionary. However, Dr. Carey reminds us that he was a champion of capital punishment, thought Negro suffrage preposterous, recommended imprisonment for bad language, flogging for bigamy and, to top it all, was a passionate sexist. With his eye on sales, argues Dr. Carey, Dickens was prepared to patronize and sentimentalize without restraint. His brilliant analysis of little Nell's death illustrates just this with mordant humour.
This book is a wittily subversive study of a very revered author of the english "tradition".
September 25, 2020
Wry, engaging, and still useful for scholarly purposes -- a killer combo. The highlight for me was the chapter on Dickens, women, and sexuality, which characteristically begins, "Dickens and sex is an unpromising subject." I wish more critics these days wrote like this.
January 19, 2016
Review Title: The duality of Dickens
I realized after reading this literary criticism of Dickens that while I have read nearly everything in print by this Victorian master and while I have read several biographies, I have read almost no attempts to approach his literary output critically. I would attribute this to several distinct causes:
1. Dickens is so well known and beloved that his body of work is nearly beyond approaching with an analytical eye. His output is now part of the canon of the culture, his position as the best known and best-selling author of the 19th century so unassailable that his books are as well. How dare anyone attempt to dissect Scrooge, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield?
2. Dickens himself is such a powerful character that his biography, both that which he lived and that which finds its way filtered through the loves and circumstances of the characters into the books, overshadows his output. Dickens may stand as the first modern celebrity, the person so well documented and loved that contemporaries and every reader since feels they know him personally. Of course we don't, but the perception brings us to respond to the books less as literary masterpieces than as remembered conversations with a friend, which are not in need of interpretation and for which critical analysis would seem too impersonal and intrusive on our relationship with him.
3. His body of work is, on the surface at least, so approachable that even the most superficial reader of any age and experience feels at home with the material and qualified to understand and judge it without a literary intermediary. Sometimes Dickens is treated as a children's author, since his content is suitable for young readers and since we are usually introduced to his books in a school setting. The plots are usually straightforward and the action understandable, so who needs criticism to interpret it for us?
Carey himself addresses the issue right up front in the first sentence of the introduction to what he subtitles this "study of Dickens' imagination:" "Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics." It is a startling way to open one's career as a critic of Dickens, but a wise way to diffuse the resentment that may come from readers who have not approached Dickens critically before for the reasons I listed above. And by taking the tack of examining the furniture of Dickens' imagination across his entire oeuvre as opposed to organization by book, it gives us a chance to see insights (some positive, some negative) in characters, settings, and dialogue without unsettling what we know and believe (and believe we know) about the books.
Carey then proceeds to look at how Dickens handles violence, order, humor, symbols (including particular attention to corpses and coffins), children, and sex. The common thread uniting these areas of imagination for me was the duality of Dickens mind: he would describe violence and disorder, then offset it with pictures of harmony and orderliness. He would find humor in the most unlikely of circumstances. He would write children as both tiny adults (Carey calls these variants of Dickens' children "dwarves" ) and as unique young observers seeing things in the world around them that no adult would ever see. To Carey, the "dwarves" are artificial and unsuccessful characterizations, while the scenes of heightened sense awareness like David Copperfield describing his mother's smell or Mr. Murdstone's whiskers (much thicker and uglier when seen up close after being picked up than when observed from the child's normal height so far below) are true and powerful writing.
It is the "odd contiguities" of these adjacent dualities that heralded Dickens' most powerful writing:
Dickens was a constant and prescient observer of the world around him, and he would filter those observations through his powerful imagination into his immense output of essays, letters, stories, installments, and novels. It is these observations turned into seemingly effortless (but only seemingly so--read Dickens' letters to glimpse the psychic toll this "effortlessness" took on his mind, energy, life, and relationships) prose and dialogue that make Dickens' works classic. And on the other side of the coin, Carey is right that when Dickens begins to preach, to turn his observations into the expected norms of moral and religious beliefs of the time, his writing loses its power. The question of which Dickens (the observant master or the moralistic middle class Victorian) was the true Dickens is both a topic for the many biographies beyond the scope of Carey's study (except for some short observations particularly in the area of Dickens and sexuality) and largely beside the point. As a living, breathing human being Dickens was complex; why need we categorize him into one pigeon hole over another? Let his amazing literary output speak for itself.
Carey has done an admirable job of analysis of that output to bring together these common threads of imagination into a literary criticism that can help the experienced Dickens reader understand and enjoy the novels and essays (Carey also references the "Sketches by Boz" and "The Uncommercial Traveler" essay/story collections as well). I think the effort is worth the understanding even if like me you haven't encountered Dickens outside of his books and biographies before now.
I realized after reading this literary criticism of Dickens that while I have read nearly everything in print by this Victorian master and while I have read several biographies, I have read almost no attempts to approach his literary output critically. I would attribute this to several distinct causes:
1. Dickens is so well known and beloved that his body of work is nearly beyond approaching with an analytical eye. His output is now part of the canon of the culture, his position as the best known and best-selling author of the 19th century so unassailable that his books are as well. How dare anyone attempt to dissect Scrooge, Oliver Twist, or David Copperfield?
2. Dickens himself is such a powerful character that his biography, both that which he lived and that which finds its way filtered through the loves and circumstances of the characters into the books, overshadows his output. Dickens may stand as the first modern celebrity, the person so well documented and loved that contemporaries and every reader since feels they know him personally. Of course we don't, but the perception brings us to respond to the books less as literary masterpieces than as remembered conversations with a friend, which are not in need of interpretation and for which critical analysis would seem too impersonal and intrusive on our relationship with him.
3. His body of work is, on the surface at least, so approachable that even the most superficial reader of any age and experience feels at home with the material and qualified to understand and judge it without a literary intermediary. Sometimes Dickens is treated as a children's author, since his content is suitable for young readers and since we are usually introduced to his books in a school setting. The plots are usually straightforward and the action understandable, so who needs criticism to interpret it for us?
Carey himself addresses the issue right up front in the first sentence of the introduction to what he subtitles this "study of Dickens' imagination:" "Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics." It is a startling way to open one's career as a critic of Dickens, but a wise way to diffuse the resentment that may come from readers who have not approached Dickens critically before for the reasons I listed above. And by taking the tack of examining the furniture of Dickens' imagination across his entire oeuvre as opposed to organization by book, it gives us a chance to see insights (some positive, some negative) in characters, settings, and dialogue without unsettling what we know and believe (and believe we know) about the books.
Carey then proceeds to look at how Dickens handles violence, order, humor, symbols (including particular attention to corpses and coffins), children, and sex. The common thread uniting these areas of imagination for me was the duality of Dickens mind: he would describe violence and disorder, then offset it with pictures of harmony and orderliness. He would find humor in the most unlikely of circumstances. He would write children as both tiny adults (Carey calls these variants of Dickens' children "dwarves" ) and as unique young observers seeing things in the world around them that no adult would ever see. To Carey, the "dwarves" are artificial and unsuccessful characterizations, while the scenes of heightened sense awareness like David Copperfield describing his mother's smell or Mr. Murdstone's whiskers (much thicker and uglier when seen up close after being picked up than when observed from the child's normal height so far below) are true and powerful writing.
It is the "odd contiguities" of these adjacent dualities that heralded Dickens' most powerful writing:
Such juxtapositions, like conservatories [growing peach blossoms in winter snow], provided tangible evidence for Dickens' favorite theory about the smallness of the world--'how things and persons apparently the most unlikely to meet are continually knocking up against esch other. Dickens' symbolic writing is best, then, when it sticks closest to physical objects and doesn't break out into abstract--and especially religious--annotation. (p. 113 of this edition)
Dickens was a constant and prescient observer of the world around him, and he would filter those observations through his powerful imagination into his immense output of essays, letters, stories, installments, and novels. It is these observations turned into seemingly effortless (but only seemingly so--read Dickens' letters to glimpse the psychic toll this "effortlessness" took on his mind, energy, life, and relationships) prose and dialogue that make Dickens' works classic. And on the other side of the coin, Carey is right that when Dickens begins to preach, to turn his observations into the expected norms of moral and religious beliefs of the time, his writing loses its power. The question of which Dickens (the observant master or the moralistic middle class Victorian) was the true Dickens is both a topic for the many biographies beyond the scope of Carey's study (except for some short observations particularly in the area of Dickens and sexuality) and largely beside the point. As a living, breathing human being Dickens was complex; why need we categorize him into one pigeon hole over another? Let his amazing literary output speak for itself.
Carey has done an admirable job of analysis of that output to bring together these common threads of imagination into a literary criticism that can help the experienced Dickens reader understand and enjoy the novels and essays (Carey also references the "Sketches by Boz" and "The Uncommercial Traveler" essay/story collections as well). I think the effort is worth the understanding even if like me you haven't encountered Dickens outside of his books and biographies before now.
January 14, 2010
To my mind, the best critical study of Dickens' wild imagination. Not only wonderfully insightful, it is also as funny and weird as its subject.
August 23, 2025
Ricks was always right about Carey: unscrupulous in all he has written. This cannot realistically be called a study of Dickens at all — it is rather a rambling exhibit of some of the best bits of Dickens, with a tour guide bent on making the field-trip a freak-show: Dickens talked about coffins, isn’t that great? And waxworks, and sometimes corpses look like waxworks! Dickens described a few fires and there was a spontaneous combustion in Bleak House! Oooo, how exciting. Here is everything slightly grotesque in the Dickens canon grouped together for your convenience - evidence all collected without a shred of argument. Indeed, Carey is simply not interested in convincing his reader of anything that is not already fairly obvious: so many times I said to myself, ‘well this is all well and good, but where is it leading to, and why does it matter?’ Never was this question sufficiently answered. If we are really to be satisfied with a book that ‘argues’ “Dickens was drawn to strange things and put them in his novels”, we really need to think about the standards of our literary criticism.
Carey is not a close-reader by nature, which is perhaps why the project doesn’t appeal to me so much. But reading this after finishing the rest of his critical writing, you realise that Carey is not only uninterested in close-reading, he is not even interested in reading. He has always had a knack for generalisation—indeed, his generalisations are often startlingly penetrating—but he will always manage to misread or miss some more delicate shade of feeling integral to a passage under discussion. The whole project is also marred by the sanctimonious side of Carey that developed after his work on Milton and Donne: he is too eager to condescend to his subject, and his eagerness to be right-on often clouds his literary-critical vision. When he reprimands David Copperfield’s lack of sexual excitement upon viewing the breastfeeding Mrs. Micawber, it is frankly wince-inducing. Sometimes to be prudish is to be proper.
The best bit in this book is the chapter on Bleak House added in the second edition. One of my biggest problems with the book is its rambling nature, with Carey moving freely from novel to novel as a thematic heading demands, without any sense of chronology. By sacrificing this sense we lose with it the sense of progression, the sense of Dickens as a dynamic and developing artist. The picture we get of the man is thus much more static than Carey claims it is (his frequent championing of ‘flexibility’ is really nothing of the sort—Carey likes the mad Dickens and hates the chaste Dickens, and would prefer to charge Dickens with hypocrisy rather than investigating how the two sides interact dynamically). The hurried-tour-guide approach does not allow Carey to penetrate deeply into any specific novel for more than a paragraph at a time before he is forced to move on to the next one - and this breadth comes at the expense of depth. When he writes sustainedly on one text, however, his insight is much more valuable. The notion that Bleak House is really two novels, neither of which Dickens could actually write, is fantastically well observed.
Carey is not a close-reader by nature, which is perhaps why the project doesn’t appeal to me so much. But reading this after finishing the rest of his critical writing, you realise that Carey is not only uninterested in close-reading, he is not even interested in reading. He has always had a knack for generalisation—indeed, his generalisations are often startlingly penetrating—but he will always manage to misread or miss some more delicate shade of feeling integral to a passage under discussion. The whole project is also marred by the sanctimonious side of Carey that developed after his work on Milton and Donne: he is too eager to condescend to his subject, and his eagerness to be right-on often clouds his literary-critical vision. When he reprimands David Copperfield’s lack of sexual excitement upon viewing the breastfeeding Mrs. Micawber, it is frankly wince-inducing. Sometimes to be prudish is to be proper.
The best bit in this book is the chapter on Bleak House added in the second edition. One of my biggest problems with the book is its rambling nature, with Carey moving freely from novel to novel as a thematic heading demands, without any sense of chronology. By sacrificing this sense we lose with it the sense of progression, the sense of Dickens as a dynamic and developing artist. The picture we get of the man is thus much more static than Carey claims it is (his frequent championing of ‘flexibility’ is really nothing of the sort—Carey likes the mad Dickens and hates the chaste Dickens, and would prefer to charge Dickens with hypocrisy rather than investigating how the two sides interact dynamically). The hurried-tour-guide approach does not allow Carey to penetrate deeply into any specific novel for more than a paragraph at a time before he is forced to move on to the next one - and this breadth comes at the expense of depth. When he writes sustainedly on one text, however, his insight is much more valuable. The notion that Bleak House is really two novels, neither of which Dickens could actually write, is fantastically well observed.
August 20, 2013
‘Violent Effigy’ is a companion-piece to Carey’s study of Thackeray, ‘Prodigal Genius’. It is equally good in its way: a wise and witty compendium of all that is most distinctive in Dickens, emphasising the comic, the violent and the strange, and arguing against attempts to draw a consistent philosophy or moral from his work. It is precisely his lack of consistency that makes Dickens live.
If it is slightly less engaging than the Thackeray book, it may be because Thackeray was in much greater need of critical rediscovery. Many of Thackeray’s best works are virtually unknown to modern readers. Carey did a splendid job of uncovering the gems hidden amongst his early essays, stories and occasional pieces. Of Dickens, on the other hand, there is not much new to be said. What one takes most from this entertaining trawl through the dark alleyways of Dickens’ imagination is what a genuinely strange, morbid, conflicted, endlessly energetic man he was...
If it is slightly less engaging than the Thackeray book, it may be because Thackeray was in much greater need of critical rediscovery. Many of Thackeray’s best works are virtually unknown to modern readers. Carey did a splendid job of uncovering the gems hidden amongst his early essays, stories and occasional pieces. Of Dickens, on the other hand, there is not much new to be said. What one takes most from this entertaining trawl through the dark alleyways of Dickens’ imagination is what a genuinely strange, morbid, conflicted, endlessly energetic man he was...
July 22, 2022
A decent book about imagination of Charles Dickens. Where he talks about some of his other books and references them lots. The problem is I don't actually remember any Charles Dickens books that I've read in any amount of detail so found this one a little bit frustrating. I'm sure if you've read lots of his books this might be of more interest to you.
Anyway here are some of the best bits from the book:
Dickens formerly a hearty advocate of universal education now sees it as the breeder of pedantry and social pretensions. Once educated the lower classes get above themselves. He might have made a good sailor if when a pauper child he had taken to the sea instead of to learning. As it is, his learning is merely mechanically acquired. Needless to say Dickens doesn't explain what the alternative ways of acquiring learning might have been. Sunny: sometimes I think a lot of my own learning has been mechanically acquired or inorganically acquired. I certainly think it's the same for a lot of the members of our wider family who previously having come from a certain degree of poverty have had lots of “layers” of education foisted onto them. It's like a big cake which is predominantly a little bit of baked cake at the bottom but then inches and inches of thick thick cream piled on top. And as you will know … cream doesn't make a cake … It makes cream.
The child’s sense smell is also inordinately sensitive and having his nose two or three times nearer the ground than an adult he takes in the smells of floor coverings, plants and furniture and much more readily.
When in this mood Dickens stresses the absurdity of teaching children facts: all the child needs is to have its imagination stimulated by the Arabian nights and at a later age by the novels of fielding and smollett : this being virtually the extent of Dickens’ own education.
Anyway here are some of the best bits from the book:
Dickens formerly a hearty advocate of universal education now sees it as the breeder of pedantry and social pretensions. Once educated the lower classes get above themselves. He might have made a good sailor if when a pauper child he had taken to the sea instead of to learning. As it is, his learning is merely mechanically acquired. Needless to say Dickens doesn't explain what the alternative ways of acquiring learning might have been. Sunny: sometimes I think a lot of my own learning has been mechanically acquired or inorganically acquired. I certainly think it's the same for a lot of the members of our wider family who previously having come from a certain degree of poverty have had lots of “layers” of education foisted onto them. It's like a big cake which is predominantly a little bit of baked cake at the bottom but then inches and inches of thick thick cream piled on top. And as you will know … cream doesn't make a cake … It makes cream.
The child’s sense smell is also inordinately sensitive and having his nose two or three times nearer the ground than an adult he takes in the smells of floor coverings, plants and furniture and much more readily.
When in this mood Dickens stresses the absurdity of teaching children facts: all the child needs is to have its imagination stimulated by the Arabian nights and at a later age by the novels of fielding and smollett : this being virtually the extent of Dickens’ own education.
January 13, 2024
One of the best literary studies of any author I have ever read. Carey brings humor, insight, and wisdom to the task. He does not take things too seriously and sheds light on some of the themes Dickens was concerned with. Carey also starts by saying that Dickens is infinitely greater than his critics. That is an honest, commendable approach.
August 8, 2023
Though the speed, or lack thereof, in my reading may appear incongruous with a 4 star rating, I enjoyed this collection of essays on Dickens. While I have read many of Dickens’ novels, a professor’s collection of essays on the author exclusively really drives home my need to read more.
September 4, 2023
Interesting.
May 18, 2025
despite the naff title, a brilliant survey of the strangeness of dickens' mind, especially his macabre fascination with deformity and violence; the sheer oddness of his imagination. marred only by the author's witless lapses into socialism.
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