York City. She is the author of Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Novel, Genre, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts and collections ranging from Just Below South to The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature. She serves on the advisory board of the North American Victorian Studies Association and the editorial board of Dickens Studies Annual.
Berman applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper: Representing the People, and reported the following:
On page 99 of Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper, you’ll find a description of Charles Dickens’s 1835 sketch “The Parlour.” This vignette features a man speaking to the crowd in an alehouse, but it’s a great example of the kind of rhetoric observed by Dickens in his work as a parliamentary reporter. Political bombast abounds: “What is an Englishman?” the man asks. “Is he to be trampled upon by every oppressor? . . . What’s freedom? Not a standing army. What’s a standing army? Not freedom.” Dickens emphasizes the performative aspects in his account: “and the red-faced man, gradually bursting into a radiating sentence, in which such adjectives as ‘dastardly,’ ‘oppressive,’ ‘violent,’ and ‘sanguinary,’ formed the most conspicuous words, knocked his hat indignantly over his eyes, left the room, and slammed the door after him.”Learn more about Dickens and Democracy in the Age of Paper at the Oxford University Press website and follow Carolyn Vellenga Berman on Twitter.
Does this sample reveal the quality of the whole book? Yes. It’s typical of my procedure throughout the book: using quotes from Dickens to show how parliamentary discourse was spreading across the social field in the nineteenth century. I particularly emphasize how Dickens reflects on this diffusion, to comic effect. In this case, we see not a member of the House of Commons, but a drunk saying, “if I was a Member of the House of Commons . . . I’d make ’em shake in their shoes.” This dynamic is key to Dickens’s fiction.
Page 99 also foregrounds the parliamentary debates on slavery and emancipation in the 1830s, another leitmotif of the book. Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British colonies in 1833, but only after a period of “apprenticeship” for the enslaved, which extended until 1838. I argue throughout the book for the formative importance of these political debates in Dickens’s work.
The larger story I tell in the book involves two kinds of publications emanating from Parliament: not only the newspapers and other commercial publications representing Parliament to the public, but also the vast expanse of official publications representing the People to Parliament—and then sold to the public as readers.
For Dickens and other commentators, this historical period was an “age of paper.” I love it that page 99 ends with the word “paper,” in another quote from the sketch: “a numerous race are these red-faced men,” so, “just to hold a pattern one up . . . we took his likeness,” and “that is the reason why we have written this paper.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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