Dickens’ influence and reception in Portugal

Abstract

As a writer of worldwide resonance, continually eliciting responses in a variety of registers and media, Dickens is indeed comparable to Shakespeare for the Portuguese public. In particular, the Victorian writer’s preoccupations concerning industrialization, urbanization, the conditions of the poor and the need for educational and social reform have made themselves felt in the work of some of his most notorious contemporary Portuguese writers. But Dickens’s presence in Portugal from the nineteenth to the twentieth-first centuries is also shaped by an alertness to both the local (identification with London) and the global features of his multifaceted work (fiction, travel books, journalistic essays, letters). In my paper, I intend to explore the extent to which this charismatic English writer has influenced Portuguese artists and intellectuals with his poetic prose, richly dark humour, profound sentiment and pathos, Romantic realism and grotesque representations. I will, therefore, concentrate my analysis mostly on the literary reception of the so-called Dickensian style in some Portuguese writers and their respective works.