The Fever Dreams of Charles Dickens

The Critic
August 10, 2020

In the Victorian Era viral illness incited pathological fear exacerbated by the lack of empirical understanding about what germs were or how viruses mutated. In Charles Dickens’ novels, fevers served a narrative function, leading to the victim’s disfigurement, destruction or moral salvation. Writing in The Critic, Natasha Green suggests that our own paranoid fears aren’t so different from our ancestors’.

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