Mudfog: Crabbe and Dickens, and the View from the Marshes

Abstract: This paper asks about the relationship of Crabbe's poetry (and his life) to Dickens, and pursues an interest in the marshy and muddy landscapes of David Copperfield, Bleak House , and Great Expectations , with attention also to Little Dorrit . I am interested in Dickens's neologism "mudfog," and how this extends through his fiction; in this specific case looking at Orlick in Great Expectations . I read him as deriving from Crabbe's Peter Grimes, and as an incarnation of the oozy stagnancy of the marshes in the novel. Here I draw on Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille on the abject and the formless as a way of conceptualizing what Orlick, one of Dickens's more surprising characters, might represent. The whole paper is a continuation of interests discussed in an earlier paper on "Mudfog" ( Dickens Quarterly , June 2024).