On Innocence: Dickens, Blake, and Wordsworth

Abstract:Considering Dickens's relationship to the English Romantics, and to their poetry, this paper speculates on any possible relationship Dickens might have had with the work of William Blake, and tries to make the question more approachable by pondering Blake's relationship to Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's to Dickens. Triangulating the question thus, I think about Dickens and innocence, and about innocence in Blake and Wordsworth, and take my primary examples from Wordsworth's "We are Seven," and from Dickens and Nell, and eighteenth-century graveyard poetry, and the manifestation of these things in The Old Curiosity Shop. No positive account of influence can of course be given, but the paper hopes to make further inquiries about Dickens and (Romantic) innocence possible through its readings of texts.