Fortune's wheel

About this book

"In the first half of the nineteenth century, England became quite literally a world on wheels. The sweeping technological changes wrought by the railways, steam-powered factory engines, and progressively more sophisticated wheeled conveyances of all types produced a corresponding revolution in Victorian iconography: the image of the wheel emerged as a dominant symbol of power, modernity, and progress." "Charles Dickens appropriated this symbol and made it central to his novels. Between 1840 and 1860, a transformation took place in Dickens's thinking about gender and time, and this revolution is recorded in iconographic representations of the goddess Fortune and wheel imagery that appear in his work." "Drawing on a history of both literary and visual representations of Fortune, Elizabeth Campbell argues that Dickens's contribution to both the iconographic and narrative traditions was to fuse the classical image of the wheel with the industrial one. Campbell's close reading of Dickens reveals that, as the wheel was increasingly identified as the official Victorian symbol for British industrial and economic progress, he reacted by employing this icon to represent a more pessimistic historical vision - as the tragic symbol for human fate in the nineteenth century."--Jacket.