‘These Acres of Print’: Charles Dickens, the News and the Novel as Pattern

While Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers enable readers to imagine national community, Charles Dickens’s writings are attentive to the varying ways that the newspaper press might shape, inhibit, or fragment community through its uncontrolled production of miscellaneous content and matter. This first chapter shows the growing distinction that Dickens drew between fiction and nonfiction, novel and newspaper, in his communal visions for serial publication. Early Dickens characterised the newspaper press as a meteorological force of destruction, a thunderstorm threatening to engulf the city of London, yet continually produced to meet the endless public appetite for more news. Over the course of his career, Dickens experimented with other metaphors for the working of serial narrative and its influence on a reading public. From an intangible creature telling stories to a weaver at his loom, Dickens encourages readers to see the instance of a particular serial output linked to its larger structure over time. In doing so, he privileges the power of serial fiction to cultivate new ways of envisioning community.