Keeping The Circus Alive - abusing amusements and amusing abusers in Dickens' subversive wonderland.
ASIN: B00PEWCB10
Publisher: unknown
Pages: 20
On the 28th June 1938, whilst the majority of the population was watching the coronation of the Queen, Charles Dickens was revelling in the festivities of Hyde Park a few miles away. This small act of subversion embodies the very ethos of the entertainment Dickens was watching and his anti-authoritarian attitude toward it characterizes his ‘carnivalesque’ novels. As is his fiction, the fair – or its larger counterpart, the circus – was ‘absurd and charming, breathtaking and predictable … eclectic, yet also type-ridden’. Even though performed in the ring, the circus resists circumscription. The circus is paradox. Synonymous with Dickens’ work, it displays a carnival subversion of social norms in its profuse display of the grotesque whilst simultaneously pandering to the needs of the populous to market and sell its product; it is both booming and ‘predominantly mute’, both seemingly ...
