The Dickens Pantomime

All his life Charles Dickens was fascinated by the Christmas Pantomime, one of the most popular and least respectable of nineteenth-century genres and still one of the most successful forms of British drama. InThe Dickens PantomimeEdwin Eigner shows how Dickens based his characters on the dramatis personae of Pantomime and how he structured his novels according to the two-part pattern of the early nineteenth-century panto, a pattern based on transformations effected by stage magic. In Dickens' hands the Pantomime characters expressed some of the most significant concerns of the times, and the transformations they underwent, mirroring the structural transformations of the Pantomime itself, provided means of rescuing Victorians from problems which seemed unsolvable given their prevailing world view. This book deals with all of Dickens' novels, the so-called light novels and the dark, and with the comic as well as the tragic characters. It concentrates, however, onDavid Copperfield, the middle novel in the Dickens' canon. Eigner places Wilkins Micawber at the center of the author's vision, where this supreme comic creation can illuminate the behavior of a zany like Dick Swiveller ofThe Old Curiosity Shopas well as the desperation of such tragic figures from the late novels as Sydney Carton ofA Tale of Two Cities. Micawber, Eigner argues, provides the creative absurdity necessary to change the lives of both the characters and the readers of the novels.Eigner, Edwin M. is the author of 'The Dickens Pantomime', published 1989 under ISBN 9780520062559 and ISBN 0520062558.