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Death as spectacle: the Paris morgue in Dickens and Browning

Martens, Britta

Authors



Contributors

Stanley Friedman
Editor

Edward Guiliano
Editor

Anne Humpherys
Editor

Natalie McKnight
Editor

Michael Timko
Editor

Abstract

As an object of macabre fascination, the Paris morgue is without parallel in the Victorian imagination. This article explores the representation of visits to the morgue in Dickens’s Uncommercial Traveller and in Browning’s dramatic monologue “Apparent Failure.” In both cases, this gruesome display of French sensational culture is used to explore a very British middle-class dilemma in the 1860s: how to reconcile the attraction to new forms of sensational entertainment (notably through journalism and fiction) with the fear of succumbing to a “vulgar” sensationalism that had hitherto been the preserve of the working class. Dickens’s traveler experiences the voyeuristic crowd as an extreme version of the mass readership, echoing the idiom of reviewers of sensation novels; yet despite distancing himself from these working-class foreigners, he inescapably shares their fascination with the sensational. Similarly, Browning’s poem exposes the tourist’s (ultimately vain) effort to deny his fascination with the sensational and to claim the moral high ground over French mores. This article thus combines instructive cross-national comparisons with reflections on a specifically British middle-class anxiety over the growth of sensational culture.

Publication Date Jan 1, 2008
Journal Dickens Studies Annual
Print ISSN 0-404-18939-3-/-978-0-404-18939-6
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume Volume
Pages 223-248
Book Title Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction
ISBN 978-0-404-18939-6
Keywords Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, morgue, death, spectacle
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1020183
Publisher URL http://www.amspressinc.com/dsavols.html#32