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Conceiving A “Veneration For Clowns ”: Popular Amusement And Social Subversion In The Novels Of Charles Dickens, Abigail Palmisano

Theses and Dissertations

Despite the immense popularity of common street amusements in the Victorian era, the allocation of leisure time to the venue of ribald diversions was often deprecated by moralists. In argument that theatrics depicting bawdy and often violent scenes would invite undesirable

behavior into the habits of their audience, moralists decried the participation of such amusements amongst the common people. In the Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Peter Schlicke states that “in the anxious debates in much of Victorian middle-class and religious world about the moral legitimacy of this or that form of leisure the underlying assumption was that leisure should …