Writing Letters to Come to 'Terms' with Domestic Economy: Household Management in Dickens's Early Correspondence"

Nathalie Vanfasse (1)

1 LERMA - Laboratoire d'Etudes et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone

In this essay, I will show how issues related to domestic economy are spelled out in epistolary form in Dickens's correspondence. This medium plunges us in an intimate form of perception of and reaction to these economic matters. A sample of Dickens's early correspondence exemplifies how his letters, at times, dealt with delicate financial issues involving close members of his family. The following epistolary exchanges yield invaluable insights first into the economic misfortune brought about repeatedly by Dickens's father upon his family, and then into Dickens's prospective domestic economy with his future wife, Catherine Hogarth. In Dickens's letters, family business dovetails with the negotiation of publishing contracts, 1 as well as with diverse other financial transactions. These business cum private matters partake of Dickens's epistolary biography. Besides, the very form and content 2 of these letters also produce a form of economic knowledge in that they show us how Dickens comes to "terms" literally and literarily with domestic economy. What unfolds before our eyes, as we read through these letters, is household management in progress. Thus, to some extent, Dickens's letters provide a form of economic and business knowledge. In the light of recent analyses of epistolary discourse (e.g. Banks 2013), I will consider how Dickens tackles the financial matters already mentioned through epistolary modes and forms, in other words how these monetary considerations are expressed in his letters. In this respect, epistolary theory (e.g. Matthews-Schlinzig and Socha 2017) sheds light on Dickens's writing about domestic economy. On the basis of approaches to the discourse of the absent implied by letter-writing (e.g. Arrou-Vignod 1993), and with the help of the notion of an epistolary self (e.g. Earle 1999), as well as an analysis of the intimacy of letters between an individual and his nearest and dearest (e.g. Panzera and Canonica 2017), I will show that Dickens's epistolary self may be delineated through economic narratives of loss and redemption as well as through his prospects of household management. Recent studies on business correspondence and private correspondence, as well as on the structure of these writings (e.g. Harang 2002) allow us to cast new light upon

Domaines: Littératures

Nathalie Vanfasse. Writing Letters to Come to 'Terms' with Domestic Economy: Household Management in Dickens's Early Correspondence". Nineteenth Century Prose, 2019. ⟨hal-02483744v1⟩