Her paper proposes a new way of thinking about Dickens’s “little” characters, primarily in The Old Curiosity Shop, referencing Melanie Klein’s play-technique. Klein was the first to theorize the anxious aggressive child, and to posit a complex object relating in which the damage and repair of toys mediated and modulated the unmanageability of infantile emotion. Dickensian characterization, often criticized as object-like and lacking complex interiority, can be understood to intuit the developmental dynamics that Klein would locate in interactions between the child and the thing. Dickens’s increasingly interiorized protagonists are surrounded and mirrored by toy-like figures that problematize the thesis of novelistic maturation, proving as essential to the depiction of a complex psychology as internal monologue or achieved Bildung.
Vanessa Smith is professor of English at the University of Sydney. This paper is taken from her book manuscript Toy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature, which will be published by Fordham University Press in 2022.
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