Contemporary Context
1860 – “Hunted Down” by Charles Dickens (Portion the First)
On August 4th, 1860, Collins published his thirty-seventh installment The Woman in White in All the Year Round. Several pages after Collins’s update, Charles Dickens included the first installment of a two-part sensation story titled “Hunted Down.”
Although the novel and short story differ in length and scope, the concerns that “Hunted Down” raises have a lot in common with the issues at stake in The Woman in White. Scholars such as Deborah Wynne and Philip Allingham have argued that this juxtaposition was deliberate. Indeed, Wynne highlights this story as a prime example of the ways that Charles Dickens assembled the weekly issues of his magazines with an eye to thematic cohesion (Wynne 39, 41). She points out that when an installment of Collins’s novel “which foregrounded revelations of crime and worrying instances of debilitated health” appeared in All the Year Round, Dickens often paired it with sensational news items and stories about “crime, health, and safety” (39). For added support to this claim, we can look to Philip Allingham’s account of the origins of “Hunted Down:” Dickens had written this tale in 1859 and had granted a New York magazine the license to publish it.[1] Eleven months later, Dickens decided to dust it off and republish it in his London magazine alongside Collins’s tale.
This juxtaposition offers us opportunities to look for points of resonance and dissonance between the two stories. Some questions to consider:
- How are the characters in “Hunted Down” similar to or different from those in The Woman in White?
- Are there any similarities in the ways that gender operates in these narratives?
- How does this narrative represent mental and/or physical illness?
- Wilkie Collins’s narrative calls a great deal of attention to legal documents and the role of lawyers. In Dickens’s story, how do legal institutions—or more specifically, life insurance documents and Life Assurance managers—operate? If a similarity or difference stands out to you, what significance do you draw from it? Where would you look to find out more?
- Does Dickens’s narrative style or approach to suspense in this story resemble Collins’s novel in any ways?
HUNTED DOWN.
BY CHARLES DICKENS.
IN TWO PORTIONS. PORTION THE FIRST.
I.
MOST of us see some romances in life. In my capacity as Chief-Manager of a Life Assurance Office, I think I have, within the last thirty years, seen more romances than the generality of men, however unpromising the opportunity may at first sight seem.
As I have retired, and live at my ease, I possess the means that I used to want, of considering what I have seen, at leisure. My experiences have a more remarkable aspect, so reviewed, than they had when they were in progress. I have come home from the Play now, and can recal the scenes of the Drama upon which the curtain has fallen, free from the glare, bewilderment, and bustle, of the Theatre.[2]
Let me rec