Dickens Undone seeks to reframe what is commonly construed as the periphery of Victorian novels as an expansive, fertile area of ‘undone science.’ The introduction argues that the characters populating this ‘periphery’—often referred to as ‘minor characters’—are the tip of an iceberg of ‘negative knowledge’ in Victorian Studies: knowledge that is systematically presented as not worth gaining. This disciplinary closure, I suggest, is embedded in a centripetal aesthetics that is racialising and heteronormative, and shapes the knowledge that we do produce on a fundamental level. The readings of Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit that follow seek to generate and trial analytical tools that can help readers appreciate ex-centric elements, in other words, tools that can help ‘get the science done.’ To break with the racialising heteronormative categories of ‘main’ and ‘minor,’ ‘central’ and ‘peripheral’ characters that continue to order our thinking, I propose a critical practice that aims to read lovingly, in Agamben’s interpretation of the term: a critical practice that seeks to ‘want’ a text ‘with all of its predicates,’ including aspects and characters that have been previously dismissed as ‘minor’ or ‘mere details.’ The first two readings look for ways of appreciating two particular qualities in characters that tend to put critics off: lack of structural relevance and what E. M. Forster called ‘flatness,’ respectively. Chapters three and four use these interpretative tools to zoom in on individual characters that have been considered peripheral to David Copperfield and Little Dorrit. Both readings uncover previously overlooked facets of key thematic concerns of these texts—autobiography and imprisonment, respectively—demonstrating how a more loving, less lopsided reading practice can considerably deepen and subtilise critical understanding of a text as a whole. To illustrate the extent to which our centripetal aesthetics have distorted our knowledge of Dickens’s writing, the readings in Dickens Undone pay special attention to one particular group of characters whose systematic marginalisation by the Academy is unusually well-documented: working- and lower-class women and women of (some) economic independence. These characters’ exclusion from the conversation, I argue, has been refigured as a critical fiction: that femininity in Dickens is strictly middle-class. The working-class and working women characters I discuss are (like many others) presented by their texts as explicitly feminine. They point toward a femininity that is much more accommodating when it comes to class and age—a femininity, I suggest, which in this inclusivity and in the face of the absence of women of colour in Dickens’s fiction must be examined as a technology of whiteness.
