Mudfog: Crabbe and Dickens, and the View from the Marshes.

This paper asks about the relationship of Crabbe's poetry (and his life) to Dickens, and pursues an interest in the marshy and muddy landscapes of David Copperfield, Bleak House , and Great Expectations , with attention also to Little Dorrit. I am interested in Dickens's neologism "mudfog," and how this extends through his fiction; in this specific case looking at Orlick in Great Expectations. I read him as deriving from Crabbe's Peter Grimes, and as an incarnation of the oozy stagnancy of the marshes in the novel. Here I draw on Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille on the abject and the formless as a way of conceptualizing what Orlick, one of Dickens's more surprising characters, might represent. The whole paper is a continuation of interests discussed in an earlier paper on "Mudfog" (Dickens Quarterly , June 2024). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]