Abstract While Charles Dickens’s references to Wales are few they are nonetheless significant, especially for understanding his creative and aesthetic practice. Dickens’s engagement with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales has been unjustly neglected by critics, who have assumed that because Dickens writes only infrequently about the other three of the Four Nations, there is little of interest. The new critical attention to ‘Four Nations’ approaches provides a powerful impetus for Victorianists to reconsider the treatment of the Four Nations in canonical writers to identify critical gaps and new areas for exploration. This essay seeks to redress the balance by focussing on Dickens’s references to Wales. It first provides a catalogue of Dickens’s major references to Wales, which is not available in any of the standard reference works. It then offers a reading of Dickens’s most sustained literary engagements with Wales, in A Child’s History of England and Bleak House. The essay argues that Dickens’s references to Wales consistently link violence with creativity, via allusions to William Shakespeare, Thomas Gray, and William Makepeace Thackeray, in order to register the consolidation of the United Kingdom as a modern nation and the dislocations and imaginative energy which resists that consolidatory process.
Tristan Donal Burke (Fri,) studied this question.