216 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Fred Kaplan writes about ocular control between characters in the context of
Dickens’s interest in mesmerism; he stresses that characters with mesmeric powers
are engaged in a version of the mesmeric subject-operator relationship that often
involves the sexuality of power contests between men. See Dickens and Mesmerism,
128–38 and 197–201. In “Flogging and Fascination: Dickens and the Fragile Will”
(Victorian Studies 47.4 [2005]: 505–33), Natalie Rose argues that Dickens finds fasci-
nation threatening, as it undermines the will and the secure boundaries of the self.
John Carey writes about another kind of staring that haunts Dickens: the blank
stare that acknowledges nothing human in the object of its gaze. See The Violent
Effigy, 103–4. Carey connects Dickens’s fear of this stare with his time in the blacking
warehouse, when he was exhibited at work in the warehouse window. This window
episode is often singled out as particularly traumatic and associated with scenes such
as the appearance of Fagin and Monks at the window of Oliver Twist’s pastoral
retreat, or Pip’s fear, in Great Expectations, of being watched through the forge win-
dow by Estella. The window scene I mention here, from David Copperfield, suggests a
different kind of reciprocal gazing marked by positive or negative identification.
For a study of homoerotic relationships in David Copperfield, see Oliver Buckton,
“ ‘The Reader Whom I Love’: Homoerotic Secrets in David Copperfield,” ELH 64.1
(1997): 189–222. Buckton, following Judith Butler, reads the homoerotic relation-
ships as primary, but disavowed in the retrospect of a novel that moves toward norma-
tive heterosexuality. Uriah Heep takes his place as a knower in other narratives than
mine: see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments, 116–23; and Audrey Jaffe, Vanishing
Points: Dickens, Narrative, and the Subject of Omniscience (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1991), 124–28. Poovey calls Heep “the novel’s conscience” (120); Jaffe
suggests that he “plays ‘I’ to David’s ‘you,’ creating a contest about knowledge” and
making explicit what David cannot articulate (126).
John Kucich discusses the desire for violent release from social and psychologi-
cal confinement in A Tale of Two Cities, showing how that release, including the
final self-violence of Carton’s death, remains “trapped in rivalry” (129). See “The
Purity of Violence: A Tale of Two Cities,” Dickens Studies Annual 8 (1980): 119–37.
In “The Partners’ Tale: Dickens and Our Mutual Friend,” ELH 66.3 (1999): 759–99,
John P. Farrell urges us to think of a “dialogical” construction of selfhood in the
novel; he tests the many partnerships in the novel against each other for their differ-
ent takes on the possibility for creative mutual partnership that liberates individual
identity. Portions of my discussion of Our Mutual Friend appeared, in an earlier form,
in “Dickens and the Identical Man: Our Mutual Friend Doubled,” Dickens Studies
Annual 31 (AMS Press, 2002): 159–74.
Alice Meynell’s essay on Dickens’s style, “Charles Dickens as a Man of Letters,”
was published in the January 1903 issue of Atlantic Monthly and reprinted in The
Dickens Critics, ed. Ford and Lane, 95–108.
5. Manager of the House
The predecessor most akin to the interests of this chapter is John Carey’s “Dick-
ens and Order,” in The Violent Effigy, 30–54. Carey presents a Dickens whose pas-
sion for neatness, security, and order is frequently expressed in snug houses Carey