“Start Content” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book’s earliest iterations began at the National Humanities Center. There, I was fortunate enough to be involved in a two-year fellowship in Digital Textual Studies led by Willard McCarty and Matt Jockers. What I learned from these grant leaders and my cohort about text mining helped me to conceive of a project dealing with thousands of novels and hundreds of idiomatic expressions. During a research trip to the United Kingdom in the summer of 2016, I was lucky to meet with Michaela Mahlberg and her team at the University of Birmingham while they were developing the CLiC (Corpus Linguistics in Context) Dickens application. It was there that I first wondered how and why Dickens used certain idioms only in certain novels throughout his career. Later that summer, Jim Adams invited me to deliver a plenary talk at the Dickens Universe titled “Digital Dombey: The Computation of Dickensian Idioms,” and I am indebted to the faculty, graduate students, and general audience for their engagement with my germinating ideas. I am similarly indebted to the University of Virginia’s Department of English for an invitation to present an early version of my work at their Nineteenth-Century Workshop. The thoughts and questions I received there from Alison Booth, Andrew Stauffer, Chip Tucker, Karen Chase, and Steve Arata, among others, pushed me to think in new ways. Audiences at the following venues were also instrumental in this book’s development: University of Colorado, Arizona State University, University of North Carolina, University of Wisconsin, Northern Illinois University, and Iowa State University’s Digital Humanities Symposium. I am grateful, too, for the Dickens Society’s invitations to speak at Modern Language Association conferences in Seattle, Vancouver, and San Francisco. A portion of chapter 1 appeared in Dickens Quarterly, copyright © 2022, The Dickens Society. This article first appeared in Dickens Quarterly 39, no. 4 (December 2022): 460–85. I thank General Editor Dominic Rainsford and the Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to republish this material in a revised and extended form here.
My home institution, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, has provided support both large and small since I began this book as well. Early on, collaborations with scholars in Nebraska’s Literary Lab, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH), and the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Program have proven invaluable. I would like to thank particularly Marco Abel, Steve Behrendt, Michael Burton, Melissa Homestead, Guy Reynolds, Will Thomas, Stacey Waite, Laura White, and Adrian Wisnicki for their steadfast friendship and encouragement. My students at Nebraska, from the Dickens course to the Body Studies seminar, deserve applause, not only for humoring my growing obsession with idioms but also for constantly challenging my assumptions and offering me discerning pathways to think about the formation of vernacular body language in general. There is also no way I could be as confident about my word and idiom counts—particularly in the conclusion—without the superb work (counting and recounting, manually and by machine) of my graduate research assistants over the past several years: Caitlin Mathies, Luke Folk, Anne Nagel, Will Turner, Jonathan Cheng, and Trevor Bleick. In calmly helping me navigate through moments of desperation with interlibrary loans and maxed-out book limits, Brian O’Grady at Love Library deserves special thanks. This book would be far worse were it not for the following friends and colleagues who have read and commented on the project at various key stages: Barbara Black, Jay Clayton, Paul Fyfe, Peter Henry, Matt Jockers, Colin McLear, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, Andrew Stauffer, Stacey Waite, and Adrian Wisnicki. I would know much less about Dickens’s compositional processes without the generous access to the handwritten manuscripts offered to me by Douglas Dodds at the Victoria & Albert Museum and Philip Palmer at the Morgan Pierpont Library and Museum. Mahinder Kingra at Cornell University Press has been everything that an author could ever ask for since he assured me that he would be a “hands-on” (his idiom!) editor from the very start of the process; he patiently read and responded with wit and wisdom to every challenge and triumph along the way.
Last, I cannot fathom how this project could have been completed without the love and support of my family in Boston: Mom and Kenny, Dad and Janet, Missy and Jeff, Uncle Johnny and Auntie Carol, Auntie Neasie, Auntie Kate, and my four precious nieces, Parker, Sarah, Mia, and Mariah.
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.