“The Age of Veneer”: Charles Dickens and the antinomies of Victorian consumer culture

he bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012 was celebrated in myriad ways across the English-speaking world and beyond. Building on the long-standing tradition of heritage appropriations of his work, the "Dickens industry" made full use of the commercial opportunities: in Britain, a major new biography was serialised on Radio 4, while reworkings of Dickens's novels were an almost omnipresent feature on television (John 240-89). A dominant motif of this outpouring was Dickens's "humanitarianism," especially his sympathy for the poor and his injunctions to the rich on the duty of Christian charity. Surprisingly, given the ongoing economic crisis, Dickens's attitude towards material greed went largely unremarked despite the fact that Our Mutual Friend, his last completed novel published in 1865, unreservedly damned the rich for their conspicuous consumption practices. His critique of the Veneerings and their circle and, by extension, the trajectory of British society in the "age of capital," is all the more remarkable when we remember that Dickens was far from being a radical himself; he had embraced free trade in the mid 1840s and although he had conflicting feelings about capitalist modernity, Dickens had little time for attempts by either working-class Chartists or paternalistic Tories to regulate industrial "progress" (Slater).