Description
This talk recenters attention on the interplay between error—false facts, false theories—and nineteenth-century fiction, specifically Charles Dickens’s inventive misuse of antiquarian practice in Bleak House (1852-53) and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). Informed by a pattern of offhand remarks in an archive of antiquarian papers, I remodel Dickens’s Jo, Boffin, and other waterside characters as “working-class antiquaries,” a contemporaneous pejorative for laborers, farmers, and uneducated members of the public who stumbled across artifacts in day-to-day life. From the perspective of established scientists of the past, these working-class antiquaries had the potential to destroy the clarity of historical narrative. Dickens views the threat of the working-class antiquary to official knowledge as liberating, and treats historical error as both productive and essential for the construction of plot. Dickens grants real narrative authority to these working-class antiquaries, who trade historical accuracy for intimate, reparative understandings of the past. More generally, I hope to discuss the ways in which casual, lay-understandings of time and history diverged from and intersected with rigorous scientific understanding.
About the Speaker
Johana Godfrey is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University, where she recently completed her PhD, recieving the 2024 Hagstrum Prize for Best Dissertation. She has published in Victorian Studies. While allegedly reworking her dissertation on anachronism into a monograph, she is also currently at work on a project about the ways that orthodox scientific discourses were misinterpreted in the popular imagination, and the ways that fiction writers mobilized these productive errors to experiment with new forms.
About the British Studies Seminar Series
The British Studies Seminar brings together scholars to discuss work that addresses the history of Britain and the British Empire from the early modern period to present day. The seminar is co-sponsored by the Graduate Cluster in British Studies at Northwestern, Northwestern History, and the Nicholson Center for British Studies at the University of Chicago.
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This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.
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