Dickens’s Glazomania, Oliver Twist ’s Lists, and the Politics of Realism

Abstract: This article explores how early Victorian social reformers deployed lists as sanitation devices to organize messy social and material realities into representative categories. Dickens’s own notable reliance on lists has been interpreted as dovetailing with a reformist politics of realist representation. But through a reading of Oliver Twist , I argue that Dickens transforms lists from a neutral technology of organization to a more anarchic form in which parts multiply without respect to a larger whole. Dickens’s lists mingle various and often mutually incompatible categorical systems and flashily attend to grammatical parts over the regulating whole of the sentence.