Charles Dickens’s Audience in the Twenty-First Century: Service Learning and ‘Hunted Down’

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that by reading a little-known Dickens detective story, “Hunted Down,” in its original serialized context, and then performing a dramatic reading of that story to a community partner, students better understood Dickens in his own time and in ours. “Hunted Down” tells a story of professional sacrifice for the sake of saving lives, written in part for the self-serving purpose of earning money and widening personal appeal. Through close reading the story as a serial, learning about the financial agreements Dickens made with his publishers in the United States, editing the story into a script to be read before a live audience, and advertising it to a community partner in need of companionship, students felt empowered. They better understood Dickens’s logic that we can lift ourselves by lifting others, and in so doing, recognized the value of the arts.