Dickens and the Despised Mother—A Critical Reading of Three Autobiographical Novels

This work offers an original interpretation of the mothers of the protagonists in Dickens's autobiographical novels. Taking Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concept of abjection and Mary Douglas's anthropological analysis of pollution as its conceptual framework, the book argues that disgust was Dickens's primary emotional response towards the mother who abandoned him to work in a blacking warehouse, and suggests that we can trace similar signs of disgust in the narrators of his subsequent fictional autobiographies: David Copperfield, Bleak House, and Great Expectations. Displaying an extensive grasp of the critical field, the book provides a close reading of Dickens's autobiographical fragment and opens up the possibility that his feelings towards his mother bore a significant influence on his fiction. Further, the book provides a compelling overview of the theories of disgust and closes with a provocative discussion of Dickens's compulsive Sikes and Nancy public readings.

Shale Preston is an honorary research fellow in the Department of English at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. She has published articles and book chapters on Dickens and has presented papers on his work at international conferences in Europe, the United States, Asia and Australia.