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Darwinian Nature and Artistic Texts: Essays on Making / Unmaking by Allan Conrad Christensen (review)

Vol. 36, No. 4, December 2019 evading them” (136), as he depicts alternative families, reconfigured social hierarchies, and different ways of living. This collection also perceptively identifies when the balancing act proves unsustainable and how its potential to disrupt stops short of fully realizing its radical agenda. Herbert Foltinek presents Arthur Clennam and Eugene Wrayburn as tantalizing case studies of characters who begin as suggestively “modern” figures but ultimately retreat into conservative roles. Similarly, Hard Times reveals itself as, in Feldmann’s words, “a symptom of cultural complexity and cultural change” (166), rather than a coherent and unitary manifestation of radical thought. And ultimately, despite its validation of the minor gesture as a successful catalyst for change, Metz concludes that Martin Chuzzlewit does not present it as the answer to the “Condition of England” Question. Dickens himself queried his own personal impact in advocating change; after he wrote to The Times to protest the public hanging of Marie and Frederick Manning in November 1849, he admitted to William de Cerjat that “My letters have made a great to-do, and led to a great agitation of the subject; but I have not a confident belief in any change being made” (Letters 5: 683). As this impressively kaleidoscopic collection attests, Dickens’s discussions of change remain a stimulating topic well over a century later.