Dickens's Clowns

'Through its engagement with Dickens's writing across genres - fiction, journalism, memoir - and its commitment to showing the overlap and interrelationship between these forms, this book adds new dimensions to Dickens studies, Victorian studies, and the history of performance.' Holly Furneaux, Cardiff University Establishes the importance of the popular radical figure of the pantomime clown in the work of Charles Dickens This book reappraises Dickens's Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi and his imaginative engagement with its principal protagonist. Arguing that the Memoirs should be read as integral to Dickens's wider creative project on the theatricality of everyday existence, Jonathan Buckmaster analyses how Grimaldi's clown stepped into many of Dickens's novels. Dickens's Clowns presents new readings of Dickens's treatment of topics such as identity, the grotesque and violence within the context of the tropes of the Regency pantomime. This is the first study to identify the Dickensian clown as a unifying force for several Dickensian themes, overturning traditional views of Dickens's clowns as peripheral figures. Jonathan Buckmaster is an independent researcher, specialising in Dickens and his afterlives on page, stage and screen. Cover image: Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-0695-6 Barcode