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Dickensian Dimensions of Time

2016; Canadian Population Society; University of Alberta, Population Research Laboratory; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/vcr.2016.0039

1923-3280

Lindsey N. Chappell,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

Dickensian Dimensions of Time Lindsey N. Chappell (bio) Time, which for Isaac Newton was absolute and for Immanuel Kant was a priori, fell under scrutiny and even redefinition in the mid-nineteenth century. Inevitably, scientific procedures for measuring time collided with politics in Great Britain and European empires. In the 1840s, for example, the calculation of time could be especially vexed throughout the Italian peninsula depending on whose empire—that of the British, the French, the Austrian, or the Vatican—controlled a given region. Pictures from Italy (1846), Charles Dickens's Italian travel narrative, engages with these widespread discussions about the possibilities and implications of time's shape that grew alongside debates about space in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Italy's historic landscapes, Dickens examines time as both a political and a natural force. Time, in Pictures from Italy, is not a single, steady stream but is made up of many integrated dimensions and functions. Dickens's narrative endeavours to tell these various kinds of time at multiple levels simultaneously. Ultimately, the different narrative timepieces in this text renegotiate the individual's position within shifting geological and historical time scales, complicating master narratives of official history. Victorian scholarship has already noted that, with the expansion and increasing precision of rail technology, the question of standardized time engrossed the nineteenth century.1 But the question of which time reigned supreme—the cathedral's bells, the clock tower's face, the railway's timetable, the sun's rays, the ship's chronometer, the traveller's pocket watch, and so forth—became increasingly frenetic as the pope, the Italians, and various European empires (including the British) vied for influence and control over the yet-to-be-unified Italian states. Dickens's narrative sequence enacts one kind of temporal duration as the traveller moves through space. But it also describes other temporalities, embedded in different places, that Dickens sees when he examines the landscape at different scales, both in villages, whose pace is pure torpor, and in rapid, jumbled cities. In this article, I analyze Dickens's experiments with time and historiography through contemporaneous explorations of non-Euclidean geometry and the irregular patterns of self-similarity now termed fractals. Fractals have begun to interest literary scholars, appearing in Wai Chee Dimock's consideration of American literature in deep time and Jonathan Taylor's readings of non-linear history in the development of narrative omniscience. Dickens's own interest in narrative time, of course, has been well established. Kate Flint notes in her introduction to Pictures from Italy that time and the [End Page 45] entanglements of then and now occupy much of Dickens's travel narrative (xxvi–xxvii). Working from both narrative analysis and historicist methodologies, I will examine time as Dickens portrays it in this text through the history of fractals and ask how this concept develops alongside literature and manifests in Dickens's Italian travel narrative. Dickens shows how the ability to reorient time's form gives the narrative or historical interlocutor a power of curation rivalling that of political factions. Historiography thus becomes democratic even as, in this case, it is emerging as foreign empires clash among Rome's ancient ruins. When historicizing time through Pictures from Italy, we can see something that had been—and might still be—marketed as natural or objective manifest its political roots. Dickens's narrative explorations of space, time, and material thus enable us to analyze time as a formal choice organizing both present and past.2 British theories of time and history in nineteenth-century Italy helped shape both scientific innovation and Britain's self-perception as the political successor in a lineage of great empires. My aim here is to consider how temporal structures of experience develop alongside and through narrative sequences of historically and politically overwrought places. Barri J. Gold's analysis of the "mutual influence" between poetics and thermodynamics provides an exemplary model for this kind of interdisciplinarity (35). It may be said fairly that I am reiterating the now-wearied assertion that literature expresses new ideas before science can develop the formulae to articulate them with precision and certainty. Nevertheless, I am making this claim again because...