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Reading Dickens Romantically: “Night Walks”
Rukhsana Rahim Chowdhury
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2014.06.002
BRAC University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
This paper will examine the essay, “Night Walks” (2000), to see how Charles Dickens (1812-1870), a social-realist writer of the Victorian era, has used elements adapted from the Romantics in order to draw attention to the pitiable social conditions of Victorian London. Dickens’ the realist paradoxically reflected a readiness to think and feel “without immediate external excitement”. He expressed his alignment with Romanticism by way of a cultivation of feeling and empathizing. His genius was, as expressed by Bagehot, “essentially irregular and unsymmetrical” because he was “utterly deficient in the faculty of reasoning”. His daily, or rather nightly walks provided him with the inspiration to follow the Romantic tradition of writing on walks. The essay under consideration, “Night Walks”, clearly supports the notion that Romanticism was fallaciously opposed to realism. The paper will examine the ways in which the theme, style, and structure of the essay evoke the preoccupation of a Romantic soul—for whom the walk becomes a space for “encounter and reflection”—and the Romantic mind which is empowered by “imaginative self definition or discovery”.
Romanticism, imagination, isolation, self-knowledge, human-mind
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