Global Dickens

The first part of this essay presents reasons for Dickens’s global dissemination that transcend print culture, followed by an account of how this happened in white settler colonies in part through the habit of public performance and reading aloud, foregrounding the specific case of Katherine Mansfield. Subsequently, the essay outlines the history of Dickens’s reception in Europe in three major centres – Germany, France, and Russia, in which country a great translator of Dickens ushered in a great literature openly indebted to Dickens. The penultimate part considers ‘Global Dickenses’ – writers including Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul who have been characterised as Dickensian, and who acknowledge their debt to him – before concluding reflection on the thoroughly ‘English’ caricature of Dickens that once prevailed, and how the work of Ada Nisbet exploded this, creating new awareness of Dickens’s global reach as well as of the impossibility for any one scholar of encompassing this.