Mothers and Molls:

Re-imagining the Dickensian Maternal in Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx

Abstract

The Dickensian nature of Charles Palliser’s novel The Quincunx has been touted since its publication in 1989. However, little attention has been paid to one significant area in which the novel ‘re-visions’ Dickens’s fictional world – the domestic arena of mothers and mother surrogates. This article traces the connections between Palliser’s flawed mothers and mother figures and those in Dickens’s novels, in particular Palliser’s closest maternal ‘pretext’ David Copperfield, demonstrating how Palliser gives expression to the buried or repressed voices of Dickens’s mothers, wives, and children. In doing so, he both pays homage to Dickens and provides an ironic modern perspective on the Dickensian maternal.