From sketch to novel: Nonnarrative styles in Victorian fiction (Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell)

Although the novelists of the nineteenth century are considered English literature's great masters of narrative, at crucial moments in their careers many of them adopted a form distinguished by its plotlessness: the sketch. While the importance of the sketch, both in the oeuvres of such authors as Dickens and Thackeray and in the Victorian literary field as a whole, is unmistakable, its lack of plot has kept it out of the view of historians and theorists of the novel who define the novel solely in narrative terms. Yet the characteristics of the sketch that arrest temporal progress---its exhaustive attention to descriptive detail, its focus on repetitive, quotidian events, and its general discursiveness---are not so much opposed to the form of the Victorian novel as constitutive features of it. The project of my dissertation, therefore, is not only to recover the neglected form of the sketch, but also, through readings of the works of Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell, to show how its nonnarrativity is a central feature of the novel, one that alters our conception of the novel's relationship to ideological and psychic structures traditionally modeled in terms of plot.; The sketch's discursiveness foregrounds the pleasures and powers of style. As a textual element that remains unvarying throughout a text, style is structurally opposed to the mobile, restless nature of narrative; it finds its most concrete formal incarnation in both the sketch and those sketch-like, narratively static passages (descriptions, digressions, authorial asides) that add so much bulk to Victorian triple-deckers. In the language of psychology, style refers to a subject's consistent and characteristic manner, which is produced by the sedimentation of primal conflicts that have remained unresolved. Likewise, the style of a novel may be seen as the repository of historical and psychic contradictions that cannot be resolved through temporal progression and that therefore exert constant pressure on the text.; As I show in my introduction, the sketch's relationship to style is in part a function of its eighteenth-century origins as a journalistic form. Though historians of the novel have pointed to journalism as an institution that developed readers' and writers' desire for narratives, periodical forms more importantly created a taste for stable, consistent styles, which allowed journalists to pick up and dispose of any item of fleeting interest while still maintaining a distinctive and recognizable product. The style and form of a journalistic sketch thereby worked to counteract the anxiety produced by the rapidly changing world depicted by periodicals: just as picturesque sketches imposed stasis on a natural landscape in constant flux, written sketches provided the illusion of an arrested temporality. If narrative responded to modernity's bewilderingly accelerated time scheme by emphasizing coherence and causality, the sketch phantasmatically stopped time altogether.; Style, then, performs ideological work that is different from, even standing in opposition to, that performed by narrative. So Dickens's exuberant descriptions of the urban poor that initially appeared in his sketches tend to overwhelm the narratives of his first novels---narratives whose emphasis on benevolence is counteracted by the stylistic pleasure readers derive from his depictions of the miseries of the lower class. Thackeray's journalistic sketches display his tendency toward satiric discursiveness, which arose as a response to hack journalism's demand for texts whose irony could disguise their reiteration of received ideas. Pendennis incorporates such recirculated information in the form of long narratorial digressions about the commonplace nature of the novel---digressions that slow the plot and foreground a meandering, contemplative style that helped transform the image of the novelist from a hack to a leisured professional. Elizabeth Gaskell's sketchbook---like Cranford, with its rur...