Dickens Among the Irish and Its Joycean Legacy

Charles Dickens’s relationship with Ireland and the Irish forms an important context for an understanding of James Joyce’s somewhat ambivalent estimation of his great predecessor in the English novel. Critics have generally taken Joyce at his word that Dickens and the Victorian novelists are negligible factors in his fiction. The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. If Shakespeare was Joyce’s ultimate role model for artistic vision, Dickens is the English novelist that was equally inescapable, a forerunner to imitate and to reject. What complicated Joyce’s estimation of Dickens was the latter’s views on the Irish. Dickens visited Ireland three times on public reading tours: in August-September 1858, March 1867, and January 1869. Before these firsthand opportunities to observe Ireland and the Irish, Dickens’s notion of the Irish would have come from several literary sources and eventually from Dickens’s direct observation of the London Irish.