|
|
Riddles, anagrams, enigmas, and other word games have always held significant cultural sway-the strength of "word magic." My dissertation traces the place of the riddle in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British society. In this work I establish, by argument and example, three important ideas: first, the seminal place of the riddle in the popular culture of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain; second, the popular cultural and political work riddles perform as they operate at cultural thresholds: courtship, initiation, death rituals, moments of greeting, and intercultural relations; and third, the tasks riddles are assigned in the post-Enlightenment literary work of the period's three chief riddlers: William Blake, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce.
The oral tradition of the riddle, I maintain, is imported into popular print media and reaches its zenith during the close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth. From Blake, to Dickens, to Joyce, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century letters charts a "history" of the literary riddle. Three crucial texts illustrate my point: Blake's Jerusalem, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Each is the final completed work of its author, and each typifies the full range of word play during this period. From the unique enigmas of Blake's "Illuminated Books," to the conundrums of Dickens's popular serial, to the "robulous rebus" of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, "Waking Nations" uncovers a new narrative genre-the riddle-and extends our understanding of word games in literate culture.
Anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars have explained the traditional functions of the riddle in the following ways: (1) as vehicles for reflecting the cognitive abilities and the environments of different peoples; (2) as educational devices to exercise and train the intellect, to instill cultural values and attitudes, and to teach dominance and submission roles; (3) as verbal outlets for aggressive feelings and sexual desires; (4) as devices for mediating conceptual ambiguity and stimulating cognitive reexamination; and (5) as techniques for promoting the unity and cohesion of the group. Studies of the riddle abound because riddles provide such a complete index to cultural identity. Riddles demonstrate command over the words, objects, and ideas central to the life of a group. But if riddles promote cohesion by articulating recognized values, they also suggest the power of transgression. As the anthropologist Elli Kongas Maranda notes, "[R]iddles make a point of playing with conceptual borderlines and crossing them for the pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they appear" (131). It is no surprise, then, that the riddle is the favorite resource of anthropology: riddles provide a vivid expression of the conceptual borders that make up national identity. Thus, a recurrent concern of my dissertation: my study explores the ways in which literary riddles serve and contest national identity.
Traditionally, riddles take three narrative forms: the "naming" riddle-session, the "neck" riddle-session, and the "waking" riddle-session. The "naming" riddle-session, the most common, involves the posing of a series of questions that asks its audience to see the peculiar qualities of an object or creature and to discern its resemblances to other forms and forces. The "neck" riddle-session is a "naming" session that includes a condemned or imprisoned man seeking his "neck" or liberty. By posing questions which a judge or captor cannot guess, the condemned or imprisoned man is allowed to go free. The "waking" riddle-session blends the "naming" and "neck" sessions: the magical power of the "naming" session joins the liberating power of the "neck" session in an attempt to charm a subject and transport it across a conceptual threshold. Because it is the most elaborate narrative form-and potentially the most radical-my study focuses on the "waking" riddle-session. My title, then, brings together the two central concerns of the dissertation: the narrative function of the "waking" riddle and the role of the riddle in constructing and deconstructing "nations."
In The Golden Bough, J. G. Frazer describes how "waking" riddle-sessions were conducted in various English communities at important ceremonies such as weddings and funerals, and at harvest-time: "In Brittany after a burial, when the rest have gone to partake of the funeral banquet, old men remained behind in the graveyard and . . . asked each other riddles" (128). Frazer could not understand why riddles were used at such times of crisis, nor why such riddle-sessions continued into his own day. Yet recent anthropological work clarifies Frazer's discovery. At death rituals people find themselves in a situation emphasizing different categories, the world of the living and that of the dead. Because the task of these rituals is to symbolically transport the deceased across a conceptual threshold-from the world of the living to the world of the dead-riddles seem appropriate. Riddles perform such conceptual work, joining through metaphor opposing forces at cultural thresholds, and crossing them. As F. A. de Caro has observed, the "very essence of the waking session seems to mirror the situation and to symbolically express the process taking place" (181). My study asserts that Blake's Jerusalem, Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake conduct similar "waking" sessions, transforming them according to an elaborate set of conventions that suggests a new narrative genre emerging from folk traditions. For Blake, Dickens, and Joyce, "waking nations" means constructing and deconstructing cultural identity by riddling "conceptual borders" and "showing that things are not quite as stable as they appear."
Researchers have focused almost exclusively on the value and function of the oral riddle. Even when the riddle has been studied as a literary phenomenon, critics emphasize its "oral" roots-the riddle's lyrical ability to demand conceptual and cognitive reexamination. Andrew Welsh's The Roots of Lyric is the most prominent example. For Welsh, riddles seek to recreate an Edenic relationship between thing and name, signified and signifier. In the Garden of Eden, Adam becomes the ultimate Riddlee and God the Master of Riddles. To solve a riddle, like Adam in the Garden, one must both "see" and "know"-an elusive condition, since the signifier is usually sloughed off by its signified, the intelligible/sensible opposition divisively set in place. Riddles and puns demonstrate-if only for a moment-the lost clarity of Adam's vision. For Welsh, riddles enter literature through the conceits of "metaphysical wit," the constitutive power of lyric poetry.
Although Welsh's contributions have enhanced our understanding of the literary riddle, they have also led to the neglect of the most common forms of literary riddle: the anagrams, rebuses, and word games of periodical literature. Since Welsh, the "literary" study of the riddle has focused almost exclusively on its persistence as a lyric device, without accounting for the rise of anagrams, rebuses, word puzzles, and other word games in popular nineteenth-century periodicals. As a consequence, most studies-including Welsh's-see the riddle as disappearing from view precisely as the novel and other literary forms emerge. This is certainly wrong. Any survey of the nineteenth century will attest to the riddle's hold on British popular culture. The riddle persists, taking new forms according to the dictates of its changing medium and its shifting cultural production. Far from disappearing, the riddle rises into view alongside the novel, forming one important but unheard voice in the "polyphony" that Bakhtin has identified as the "heteroglot" of the novel. Indeed, the riddle enters literature just as the novel arrives to supplant the epic as the narrative genre of the nation-state. Benedict Anderson has argued that nationalism and the novel emerge concurrently with nationalist periodicals. It follows, then, that the literary riddle becomes part of the same cultural production. Blake, Dickens, and Joyce provide the most vivid examples of a new narrative genre emerging: the riddle. They also demonstrate the radical conceptual tasks "waking" riddles perform at the borders of national identity.
CHAPTER ONE: " 'RIDDLE ME RIDDLE ME REE': THE RISE OF THE SERIAL RIDDLE IN NINETEENTH-CENTRURY ENGLAND"
The first chapter will establish the wide range of word games that flourished in the cheap serial publications during the period from the reign of King George IV through the reign of Queen Victoria. Riddles, conundrums, enigmas, and other word games occupy a unique position in the history of the serial. Popular since the Renaissance, the publication of word games exploded with the advent of affordable serial magazines in the late eighteenth century. Riddles, conundrums, and enigmas held a prominent place in such periodicals as Bentley's Miscellany, The New Monthly Magazine, Punch, and Dickens's own All the Year Round. The serial format provided the perfect forum for these games. Contributors posed riddles to be solved by the next issue, and subscribers competed to be the first to guess the answer. Significantly, the answer to one serial riddle frequently became the source and text for the next. For instance, in Dickens's All the Year Round for 12 September 1863, a contributor published the riddle: "Misery, myself, and my wife." The answer to this riddle, "wo(e)man," in turn, served to inform the riddle for 19 September: "My first two letters are a man, my first three a woman, my first four a brave man, my whole a brave woman." The answer announced the next week, "heroine," became the source for the ensuing issue's riddle, and so forth. Composed by writers as diverse as Tom Hood, Christina Rossetti, and Thomas Macaulay, these self-generating games relied on punning, on literal and/or metaphorical readings of words, diagrams, and pictures in which the answer proved hidden in the text.
Such riddle-sessions have been lost to literary history. My study wishes to reclaim them. As the "wife"-"wo(e)man"- "heroine" riddle-session of All the Year Round suggests, literary riddles continue the tasks of a folk tradition. Nineteenth-century literary riddles instate and challenge the conceptual boundaries of a group-in this case the British readership of All the Year Round. The "wife"-"wo(e)man"-"heroine" riddle suggests both the conceptual constraints placed on women in British society and the transgression of these same constraints. In this narrative session, "woman" occupies a role defined by patriarchy-that of "wife," "woe," and "misery." "Woman" also transgresses patriarchal codes by becoming "man," "hero," and "heroine." Indeed, serial riddles of the period suggest an untapped resource for understanding British cultural identity. Collected books of the period do the same. Take for instance these fetching titles: The Anglo-Saxon Riddler, or the Riddles of Our Origin, Present Greatness, and Future Grandeur (1872), or John Irwine Whitty's Semi-Political Satires and Enigmas, Respecting Ireland, Afghanistan, and the Transvaal . . . To which Are Added Aunt Deborah's Prophecies, Tom Truthteller's Parliamentary Catechism, and King John, a Historical Anecdote . . . (1881). The explosion of word games in the nineteenth century has been noted by other scholars, yet no systematic study of these riddles has been conducted. This chapter undertakes original research on the relationship between cultural and national identity and the riddles of popular British periodicals and riddle-books. My study asserts the political, social, and literary value of the nineteenth-century riddle. It is precisely this value that Blake, Dickens, and Joyce recognized-a value that they extended in shaping a new narrative genre.
CHAPTER TWO: "
'THE INFINITE WHICH IS HID'" : JERUSALEM AND THE PUZZLE
OF ALBION'S WAKE
My second chapter explores the literalization of "word magic" as it enters literature through the "Illuminated" riddles of William Blake. Kenneth Burke argues that all language is a process of naming, that naming gives comfort by creating the semblance of control. Naming assumes a dimension of personal power which becomes more profound as the "naming-utterance" becomes more self-conscious. Therefore, the more artistic the utterance (or performance), the more "word magic" is being brought to bear (Burke 5-8). Burke's theory causes us to consider the space between text and audience; we look simultaneously at the performer, at the piece performed, and at its effect on the audience. My second chapter explores the intersection of Burke's theory with Blake's own vision of words. I argue that Blake uses the devices of popular word games to conduct a "literal" performance of "word magic." Like the riddlers of folk tradition, Blake uses literary riddles to stimulate cognitive reexamination and to challenge conceptual boundaries. Blake extends the experiment in the narrative riddles of his last complete "Illuminated" performance: Jerusalem.
In the face of the empirical sciences, and the evolving epistemological concerns that followed Locke's revolutionary Essay Concerning Human Understanding, William Blake, like his Romantic and Victorian heirs, struggled to keep alive a faith in knowledge attained beyond the subject-object Cartesian split implicit in the reigning epistemologies of his day. William Blake was one of the earliest poets in the Romantic period to attempt a poetic project of "riddling" the "five caverns" of man to clear the "windows of perception," which had been clouded by the unimaginative "vision" of truth taking hold in the sciences and organized religion (Europe iii:1-24, E60). For Blake this project resembles the ancient project of "naming" riddles. Thus, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake speaks of the "Ancient poets" who "animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive" (MHH 11: E38). I argue that Blake recognized the power of "naming" and that he experimented with narrative forms to bring the same power to his "literal" medium.
I will devote most of my second chapter to tracing the literalization of "word magic" in the riddle-session Blake conducts over the body of Albion. The primal story, given most fully in The Four Zoas, tells of the dismemberment of Albion, who is any man, mankind, England, and the world. He is the actual or potential human element in any situation, the perceiver, the consciousness, the body as subject. Blake believes that the entire universe originally consisted in Albion's integrated body and the creation of his desire. His fall takes the form of a compartmentalization of his body into the fundamental energies, or Zoas. Now, in their fragmentation, these energies go their separate ways as the clashing dimensions, categories, and ideologies of fallen history. Like the riddle-sessions of folk tradition, Blake's "waking" session joins opposing forces at a conceptual threshold: the clashing dimensions of fallen Albion are joined on the textual field of Blake's "Illuminated" plates.
As David Erdman has observed, most of the places enumerated at the opening of Blake's Jerusalem (J.27) may be found in Rocque's London survey of 1745. The Green Man was on the New Road from Paddington to Islington; a little further, down Love Lane, was Jew's Harp House. Pancras could be reached by wandering past Paradise Row and through the pastures called Lambs Conduit Fields, east of the Green Man. The outer "pillars"-Islington, Kentish-town, Primrose Hill, and St. Johns's Wood-were all within a two and a half mile radius of Golden Square (Erdman 473). My chapter concludes that Jerusalem is an "Illuminated" riddle-session performed over the slumbering body of Albion/London. In the ancient tradition of the "waking" riddle, Albion/London is stretched out on Blake's "Illuminated" textual field. Jerusalem joins the magical power of the "naming" riddle with the liberating power of the "neck" riddle in an attempt to charm the "Poetic Genius" from the "Bosom of Albion" and to transport it back into the city of man-in this case, London (J 99.1-5, E258-59). As in "waking" sessions, this process demands the crossing of a conceptual threshold. "In your own Bosom you bear your heaven," Blake writes: "And Earth, & all behold, tho it appears Without it is Within / In your Imagination" (J 71.17-19, E225). Albion is set before the reader as at a wake, and Blake performs the riddles that symbolically renew and revivify his society.
Blake, then, acknowledges a connection that recent critical inquiry is only now beginning to perceive: the significance of "naming" in the conceptualization of the nation-state. Drawing from the tradition of the "Ancient poets" who animated "cities" and "nations" by attributing to them "Gods or Geniuses," Blake translates the colonizing power of the "naming" riddle into the "Illuminated" revelations of his narrative puzzle: "Awake! Awake Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion / Awake and overspread all Nations as in Ancient Time" (J. 97.1-2 E256). This is the "Mental warfare" Blake wages against "Nationhood" in Jerusalem (J. 92.1-6 E252). Blake's Jerusalem "wakes" its audience and transports them beyond the conceptual boundaries of national identity.
CHAPTER THREE: THE CUP
AND THE LIP AND THE RIDDLE OF DICKENS'S OUR MUTUAL FRIEND
This chapter explores the rich literary tradition of riddles and conundrums informing Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. Blake and Dickens have long been recognized as the preeminent poets of London. Raymond Williams's now classic study The Country and the City (1973) first articulated the Romantic vision Blake and Dickens share. For Williams, Blake and Dickens use London as a way of forcing into consciousness suppressed connections of the human and social orders. Chapter three extends Williams's insights by bringing into focus the mythopoetic techniques by which Dickens and Blake execute their vision: the literalization of "word magic" through the genre of the riddle.
"The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of Our Mutual Friend" examines the ways in which a prefatory slip of paper published in the "first editions" of the novel-the initial serial publication (1864-65) and the first book edition of 1865-initiates the novel's riddles of plot, syntax, and narrative perspective. From the very outset of the work, Dickens's reader, like the chief characters in the novel, becomes involved in a game of discerning identities and motives, while the punning presence of riddles emerges as the synthesizing agent of the novel's hidden order. Drawing on Dickens's journalism and his letters, I present an aesthetic of punning and verbal play both implicit and explicit in Dickens's writings. Past critics have written convincingly on Dickens's innovative narrative techniques and their subsequent incorporation into a genre we now identify as "mystery." "The Cup and the Lip and the Riddle of Our Mutual Friend" attempts to recast Dickens's aesthetic and to present a new narrative genre suggested in Dickens's works-the riddle.
In Dickens's novel, London is spread out on a table like an etherized patient, "with a deadly kind of repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen into a natural rest" (264), or as a kind of ghostly sick man: "Animate London, with smarting eyes and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking; inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly neither" (479). Just as riddles are a transcultural phenomenon common to wakes, so Dickens performs riddles poised over the body of an "inanimate" and "deadly" London. In dissecting Victorian London, Dickens explores a society that has become unaware of its own state of decomposition; he challenges his listeners and tricks them into participating in the restructuring and revitalizing of this anatomized waste land. Like Blake, Dickens's project of riddling asks the question: "Why stand we here trembling around / Calling on God for help; and not ourselves in whom God dwells?" (Jerusalem 2: 38: 12-12, E 182).
In Our Mutual Friend, the conceptual threshold that figures Britain as a nation-state gives way to a personal London. As in Blake, London becomes any man, mankind, England, and the world. My chapter concludes that while Dickens is often seen as participating in an ideology that led to British nationalist expansion in the nineteenth century, Our Mutual Friend provides an implicit critique against expansion and the divisive forces that construct nationality. In Our Mutual Friend, "though the gods do dispose" and "many things fall out betwixt the cup and the lip," the reader negotiates uncertainties of surface and substance to achieve, with the novel's chief characters, composure and ennobling harmony. London is transported across a conceptual threshold in a "waking" session that wishes to lift man from his fallen state.
CHAPTER FOUR: "
'WHEN IS A MAN NOT A MAN?'; AND 'WAS LIFFE WORTH LEAVING?': THE
STATE OF THE LIVER AT FINNEGANS WAKE"
Like Blake and Dickens, Joyce, too, conducts a riddle-session in Finnegans Wake. Indeed Joyce's novel can be understood as a riddle-session conducted over the body of Finn MacCool, a riddle-session, that is, over the dormant body of Ireland. Just as Blake and Dickens make use of popular riddles to initiate action on the part of their readers, so Joyce does the same. In Joyce, the reader becomes part of a quest to articulate what ails fallen man. The prominence of the Humpty Dumpty riddle suggests the central presence of riddles in Joyce's text. Humpty Dumpty becomes a convenient symbol for proud, sinful man. In Joyce, Earwicker rises above his station, and then falling, reveals that his fall, like man's, mimics the riddle of Humpty Dumpty: "I, dizzed and dazed by the lumpty thumpty of our interloopings, fell clocksure off my ballast" (550.36-551.1).
Shem the Penman arrives on the scene in Book I to pose a riddle over the sleeping corpse of the text-a riddle that animates the rest of Joyce's "meandertale." Shaun describes the first riddle of the universe, as told by Shem:
Shem's bodily getup, it seems, included an adze of a skull, an eight of a larkseye, the whoel of a nose, one numb arm up a sleeve, fortytwo hairs off his uncrown, eighteen to his mock lip . . . an artificial tongue with a natural curl, not a foot to stand on, a handful of thumbs, a blind stomach, a deaf heart, a loose liver . . . [Shaun continues an anatomization of Shem and then describes how Shem] dictited to of all his little brothron and sweestureens the first riddle of the universe asking, when is a man not a man? (169.11-170.5)
The first riddle of the universe, then, becomes a riddle of origins, and one continually invoked throughout the text: "When is a man not a man?" This question implies a network of corresponding riddles that rests at the core of Joyce's Wake: "what is the beginning of man?" "what is the end of man?" "what makes up man?" and so forth. The riddle is never answered-at least not directly. While Shaun views Shem's riddle as evidence that even Shem must admit the artist is a "sham," much more than Shem's self-indictment is at stake in the chapter: ultimately, the episode (and much of the remainder of the Wake) dramatizes man's struggle toward renewal. Joyce thus signals the place of the "shaman" in re-animating "man" through the magic of words: "nam[e]." Shem's riddle is essentially an ontological project-caught up in the metaphysics of "seeing" and "knowing," the lyric project of riddles, but now as it enters the dramatic structure of Joyce's Wake.
Following Blake and Dickens, Joyce constructs a work of minute historical moment and of mythological import, a work both topical and universal. If London becomes an anatomized giant in Jerusalem and Our Mutual Friend, surely Dublin finds itself similarly anatomized in Joyce's Wake. The reader again becomes a part of a quest to articulate what ails fallen man-to "nam[e]" "man." Like Blake and Dickens, Joyce's "waking" session explores cultural thresholds. One of the answers Joyce's text seems to suggest is that "man is not a man" when he occupies a liminal space. The border of cultural and personal identity is the site Finnegans Wake explores-just as it is in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Blake's Jerusalem. In all three cases the narrator poses riddles over the body of a nation-state. Blake, Dickens, and Joyce perform tragic/comic vivisections over the cultural boundaries of London and Dublin, exploring, in riddling fashion, "the State of the Liver."
Critics have long noted the prominence of literary riddles in Joyce's Wake. Herbert Howarth called Joyce's novel "a congeries of riddles" (277); H.G. Wells complained to Joyce that his Work in Progress was composed of "Vast Riddles"(Letters I: 275); and Campbell and Robinson began their classic "Introduction to a Strange Subject" by describing the Wake as a "Running riddle and fluid answer . . . a mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind" (3). Patrick McCarthy has followed the lead by enumerating prominent riddles in his excellent study The Riddles of Finnegans Wake. My chapter extends McCarthy's scholarship by placing Joyce's "Running riddle" in the context of the popular tradition of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century word games. By connecting Joyce's Wake to the works of Blake and Dickens and to the narrative genre of the riddle, my study provides a fresh perspective for understanding the "waking" task of Joyce's "robulus rebus."
This dissertation brings together historical, generic, cultural, and comparativist approaches. My study conducts original scholarship on the word games of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain; it repositions three major authors in their historical contexts; it provides a new way of relating three canonical works; and it complicates our understanding of "word magic" and "nationality." By sketching the play of words across a number of academic disciplines, "Waking Nations" traces the rise of a new narrative genre and wakes the study of the riddle from its literary slumber.
Note:
My dissertation will require access to a number of library holdings: the Pierpont Morgan Library, the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, the British Library, the British Libary's newspaper archive at Colindale, the Foster Collection of the National Art Library, the Victoria and Albert Collection, the Tate Museum, and the National Library of Ireland. The Pierpont Morgan Library holds both the manuscript and working copies of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Blake's copy F of Jerusalem-central to my discussion. A complete archive of original serial publications can be found at The British Library. The British Library also holds the most complete collection of books of riddles, charades, conundrums, acrostics, anagrams, and rebuses-all published during the period of my study (for selection, see primary sources). Serialized game publications are best represented at the British Library, including the complete runs of Thomas Hood's weekly Hood's Magazine and the popular comic weeklies Figaro in London, Fun, Diogenes, Comic Times, and a host of others. The British Library's newspaper archive at Colindale provides a comprehensive site for the study of riddling and word games in newspapers of the period, while the National Library of Ireland in Dublin houses a complete collection of Irish "triad riddles."
Primary:
My dissertation will require the standard editions of the complete works, letter, and journals of William Blake, Charles Dickens, and James Joyce. In addition, I will be using the Illuminated Books Editions of Blake's Milton and Jerusalem (Ed. Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. Volumes 1 and 5. General Editior David Bindman. Princeton, N.J.: William Blake Trust/Princeton UP, 1991 and 1993).
The Anglo-Saxon Riddler, or the Riddles of Our Origin, Present Greatness, and Future Grandeur. By Antiquary. Also its Solution, by Edward Hine, Etc. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co, 1872.
Beeton, Samuel Orchart. Beeton's Riddle Book. A Collection of Upwards of Five Hundred Charades, Enigmas. London: S. O. Beeton, 1865.
The Believer's Riddle Book. Containing a Series of Seventy puzzles, for Young Christians. London, 1824.
Braithwaithe, John. Social Enigmas. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1895.
Brown, S., Miss. Historical Recreations: Or, Historical and Biographical Anecdotes in the Form of Enigmas, Etc.. London: Longman & Co., 1849.
Byron, Henry J., Thomas Hood, Henry Sampson, and Charles Dalziel. Editors. Fun. Vols. 1-7; Vols. 1-73. London: Charles Maclean, 1861-65; London: Edward Wylam, 1865-69; London: Dalziel Brothers, 1870-93; London: George Newnes, 1893-1901.
Capel, Charlotte Eliza. Victorian Enigmas; or, Windsor Fireside Researches: Being a Series of Acrostics Enigmatically Propounded, on Historical, Biographical, Geographical and Miscellaneous Subjects, Etc. London: Lockwood & Co., 1861.
Craufaud, Alexander Henry Gregan. Enigmas of the Spiritual Life. London: David Stott, 1888.
Curties, Marianne. Classical Pastime, In a Set of Poetical Enigmas, On the Planets and Zodiacal Signs. London: Snare & Man, 1813.
Dickens, Charles. Ed. All the Year Round, A Weekly Journal. Vols. 1-20; N.S., vols. 1-4. London: Chapman and Hall, 1859-70.
--------------. Ed. Bentley's Miscellany. Vols. 1-5. London: Richard Bentley, 1837-39.
--------------. Ed. The Household Narrative of Current Events. Vols. 1-6. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850-59.
--------------. Ed. Household Words, A Weekly Journal. Vols. 1-19. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850-59.
--------------. "Poetry and Pantomime," in All the Year Round, April 1, 1865.
--------------. "The Restoration of Shakespeare's 'Lear' to the Stage" (1838). Collected Papers Vol. I. Nonesuch Dickens. London, 1937: 123-124. [First appeared in The Examiner, February 1838.]
--------------. "A Sermon in the Britannia Theatre," All the Year Round 2 (1860): 416-21.
Hazel Nut [pseud.]. Riddle-Me-Ree. By "Hazel Nut". Southport: James Ingham, 1902.
Hitchner, Elizabeth. The Fireside-Bagatelle: Containing Enigmas on the Chief Towns of England and Wales. London, 1818.
Home Riddle Book. Containing riddles, conundrums, etc. London, 1878.
Hood, Thomas. Ed. Hood's Magazine. Vols. 1-11. London: H. Renshaw, 1844-45; London: H. Hurst, 1846-48; London: E. Churton, 1849.
J. [Judd, James?]. Recreations for Winter Evenings, Being a Selection from the Most Celebrated Round Games, Enigmas, Charades, Rebuses . . . By J. London, 1854.
The New Sphinx; an Elegant Collection of Upwards of 500 Enigmas, Etc. London: T. Tegg & Son, [1832].
Pardon, G. F. Parlour Pastimes: A Repertoire of Acting Charades, Fire-Side Games, Enigmas, Riddles, Etc. London, 1868.
Pinder, T. and F. C. Finch. Eds. The Riddle Magazine. A Journal of Poetry, Puzzles, and Pastimes. Vol. 1. Leads, 1873.
Planch, Frederick d'Arros. Guess Me: A Curious Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Acting Charades, Double Acrostics, . . . Anagrams, Etc.. Illustrated by G. Cruickshank and Others. London, 1872.
Puzzlecap, Peter, Esq. [pseud.]. The Riddler's Riddle Book . . . By Peter Puzzlecap, Esq. Banbury: J. G. Rusher, [1835].
The Recreative Companion; Or, the Entertaining & Instructive Miscellany, Containing a New Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Rebuses, Transpositions, &c. with Their Solutions; Also Choice & Instructive Maxims; Including . . . Useful Family Receipts; Together with about 1,000 . . . Toasts and Sentiments . . . Likewise Significations of the Christian Names, Most in Use . . . and Significations of Colours. To which are Added, a List of Sovereigns of Europe. Calcutta: M. D'Rozario, [1825].
The Royal Riddle Book. A New Collection of Riddles, for the Entertainment of Youth. Glasgow: J. Lumsden & Son, 1820.
The Royal Riddler; A Collection of Enigmas, Charades, Riddles, Rebusses, Conundrums . . . London, 1855.
Rosamund, Aunt. Aunt Rosamond's Historical Enigmas: Designed for Young People. London, 1850.
Routledge, Edmund. Riddles and Jokes: A Collection of Riddles, Enigmas . . . Compiled . . . by E. Routledge. London, 1862.
--------------. Ed. Riddles and Jokes; Being a Complete Collection of Riddles, Enigmas, Etc. London, 1860.
Treat, Erastus Buck. Curiosities of the Bible Pertaining to Scripture Persons, Places and Things, Including Prize Questions and Answers; Enigmas . . . By a Sunday School Superintendent. Wakefield and London: William Nicholson & Sons; and Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1880.
Unsolved Scripture Riddle. Dublin: W. Curry & Son, 1857.
Whitty, John Irwine. Semi-Political Satires and Enigmas, Respecting Ireland, Afghanistan, and the Transvaal . . . To which are Added Aunt Deborah's Prophecies, Tom Truthteller's Parliamentary Catechism, and King John, a Historical Anecdote . . .. Second Edition. London: H. Vickars, 1881.
Scriptural Enigmas, designed to exercise the youthful mind in the knowledge of Scripture history. London: J. Hailes, 1829.
Secondary Sources:
Abrahams, Roger D. "Introductory Remarks to a Rhetorical Theory of Folklore." Journal of American Folklore 81 (1968): 143-158.
--------------. "The Literary Study of the Riddle." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 14(1972): 177-97.
Ackroyd, Peter. Dickens. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.
Altick, Richard D. English Common Reader. Chicago: U. of Chicago P, 1957.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised and Extended. Second Edition. London and New York: Verso, 1991.
Aristotle. "Poetics," On Poetry and Style. Trans. G.M.A. Grube, Indianapolis: Library of Liberal Arts, 1958.
Aubert, Jacques. The Aesthetics of James Joyce. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist; Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U. of Texas P, 1981.
--------------. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
Benstock, Bernard. Joyce-Again's Wake. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1965.
------------------. "L. Boom as Dreamer in Finnegans Wake." PMLA 82 (1967): 91-97.
------------------. "The State of the Wake." James Joyce Quarterly 14 (1977): 237-40.
Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986.
Briggs, Katherine M. "The Folklore of Charles Dickens." Journal of the Folklore Institute 7 (1970): 3-20.
Brivic, Sheldon. Joyce's Waking Women. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995.
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York: Vinatage, 1961 [Rpt].
Burns, Thomas A. "Riddling: Occasion to Act." Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976): 102-3.
Connolly, Thomas E. The Personal Library of James Joyce: A Descriptive Bibliography. University of Buffalo Monographs in English, no. 6. Buffalo, N.Y., 1955.
Daly, Mary E. Dublin: The Deposed Capital, A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914. Cork, Ireland: Cork, UP, 1984.
De Caro, F. A. "Riddles and Proverbs." Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan, Utah: Utah State UP, 1986: 175-197.
Derrida, Jacques. "La Structure, Le Sign, et Le Jeu dans Le Discours des Sciences Humaines." L'Ecriture et La Difference. Editions du Seuil, 1967.
--------------. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Duckworth, Alistair M. " 'Spillikins, Paper Ships, Riddles, Conundrums, and Cards': Games in Jane Austen's Life and Fiction." Jane Austen: Bicentenary Essays. Ed. John Halperin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975.
Eaves, Morris. The Counter-Arts Conspiracy: Art and Industry in the Age of Blake. Ithica and London: Cornell UP, 1992.
Eckley, Grace. Children's Lore in Finnegans Wake. Syracuse, N.Y. : Syracuse UP, 1985.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New and Revised Edition. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.
Erdman, David V. Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 3rd Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977.
Essick, Robert N. William Blake and the Language of Adam. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Evans, David. "Riddling and the Structure of Context." Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976): 166-187.
Ferber, Michael. Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1985.
Frazer, J. F. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion. 12 Vols. New York: Macmillan, 1935.
Frosch, Thomas R. Awakening of Albion: The Renovation of the Body in the Poetry of William Blake. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1974.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957.
Glasheen, Adaline. A Second Census of Finnegans Wake. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1963.
Gleckner, Robert F. "Joyce's Blake: Paths of Influence." Blake and the Moderns. Albany: State U of New York P, 1982.
Hilton, Nelson. Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Hofheinz, Thomas C. Joyce and the Invention of Irish history: Finnegans Wake in Context. Cambridge and New York : Cambridge UP, 1995.
Hughes, Linda K, and Michael Lund. The Victorian Serial. Charlottesville: UP of Virgina, 1991.
Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
Johnson, Edgar. Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph. 2 vols. New York: Random House, 1969.
Kershner, R.B. Joyce, Bakhtin, and Popular Literature: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Knowles, Owen. "Veneering and the Age of Veneer: A Source and Background for Our Mutual Friend." The Dickensian. 81 (1985): 88-96.
Knuth, Leo. "Shem's Riddle of the Universe." A Wake Newslitter 11 (1974): 93-103.
Manganiello, Dominic. Joyce's Politics. London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
Maranda, Elli Kongas. "Riddles and Riddling: An Introduction." Journal of American Folklore 89 (1976): 131.
McCarthy, Patrick A. The Riddles of Finnegans Wake. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1980.
McHugh, Roland. Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Revised Ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.
------------------. The Sigla of Finnegans Wake. Austin : U of Texas P, 1976.
McKeon, Michael. Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987.
Metz, Nancy Aycock. "The Artistic Reclamation of Waste in Our Mutual Friend." Dickens Studies Annual: Essays on Victorian Fiction 34 (1979): 59-72.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Blake's Composite Art, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1978.
Paley, Morton D. The Continuing City: William Blake's Jerusalem. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Phipps, Frances. Let Me be Los: Codebook for Finnegans Wake. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill P, 1987
Redfern, Walter. Puns. Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1984.
Rosmarin, Adena. The Power of Genre. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985.
Stewart, Garrett. Dickens and the Trials of Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974.
--------------. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: U. of California P, 1990.
Stewart, Susan. Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Swinson, Ward. "Riddles in Finnegans Wake." Twentieth Century Literature 19 (1973): 165-80.
Taylor, Archer. English Riddles from Oral Tradition. Berkeley: U. of California P, 1951.
-----------. The Literary Riddle Before 1600. Berkeley: U. of California P, 1948.
-----------. "The Wisdom of Many and the Wit of One." The Wisdom of Many: Essays on the Proverb. Ed. Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes. [Rpt. Swathmore College Bulletin 54(1962), 4-7]. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981 [Rpt. 1994].
Tiffany, Grace. "Our Mutual Friend in 'Eumaeus': Joyce Appropriates Dickens." Journal of Modern Literature 16 (1991): 643-46.
Tindall, William York. A Reader's Guide to Finnegans Wake. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
Viscomi, Joseph. Blake and the Idea of the Book. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1993.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965.
Webb, Timothy. " 'Planetary Music': James Joyce and the Romantic Example." James Joyce and Modern Literature. Eds. W. J. McCormack and Alistair Stead. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
Weisenfarth, Joesph. Gothic Manners and the Classic English Novel. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1988.
Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon 1971.
Welsh, Andrew. Roots of Lyric: Primative Poetry and Modern Poetics. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1978.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1971.