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

Oct 15, 2026

The paper examines how teaching Charles Dickens’s detective story “Hunted Down” in its original serialized context, followed by a dramatic reading for a community partner, helps students understand Dickens both in his era and in contemporary life. It argues that students learn Dickens’s logic for “lifting ourselves by lifting others” through course credit tied to service learning as readers, editors, and marketers. The discussion also situates this approach within scholarship on relevance, digital Victorian methods, and the effects of re-printing, remediation, and oral reading communities.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages34

Reading Time1 h 26 min

AccessFree to download

Teaching Dickens’s Audience in a New Century

“Hunted Down” in original context and dramatic reading

Relevance and approaches for twenty-first-century students

Digital Victorians, remediation, and reading communities

Serial reading challenges and the value of oral performance

Service learning as a link between instruction and community need

Charles Dickens’s Audience in the Twenty-First Century: Service Learning and “Hunted Down” Megan Witzleben Hilbert College During Charles Dickens’s lifetime, education publications such as The Union Sixth Reader already shared methods for teaching his works. They did so because Dickens’s Pickwick inspired“such genial humor, such genuine wit, such graphic description, such felicity of expression, and, withal, such pathos,” that students could begin mastering rhetoric rules and elocution (Sanders 349) . The Union Sixth Reader gives evidence to educational concerns surrounding the best uses of language, as though Dickens’s turns of phrase could empower students. Today, we may not teach Dickensian prose as superior. However, we do seek to empower students through verbal and cultural literacy to connect them with influential stories of the past and present. This paper demonstrates how teaching 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, helps students understand Dickens in his own time and in ours. Students recognize his simultaneous urge to secure his own cultural status in America while advocating for the marginalized. By earning course credit and service learning credit as readers, editors, and marketers, class members better understood Dickens’s logic that we can lift ourselves by lifting others. Professors of British Literature have sought to bridge the apparent divide between nineteenth-century novels and twenty-first-century students, often noting the difficulty of teaching long works in the college semester. In his introduction to Teaching Victorian Literature in the Twenty-First Century, Laurence Mazzeno states: “Undergraduates in the twenty-first century are looking for relevance”(xxi) . Before describing the method I used in British Literature, I will review how several other scholars have taken on this challenge. Karen Bourrier argues that the “culture of re-printing and remediation on social networks such as Twitter closely mirror the circulation of scissors-and-paste journalism and the humorous miscellany in the Victorian press”(273). Her study encourages professors to question how might one “modernize” a story like “Hunted Down” into something as short as 140 characters. Would doing so help students to see how Dickens’s characters converse with the rest ofthe New York Ledger, in which it first appeared? Students can identify that the language is changing within the texts from the 1850s to now, but the drive for cultural credibility—making a name for oneself and one’s ethical views through media—has not changed. Through Bourrier’s study of tweets about Victorian literature, she concludes: “quotations from Victorian novels sound even more like maxims than in their original context”(278) . Transcribed into 140 characters, a line from the past takes on urgency and perhaps an extreme tone that had been moderated by surrounding storylines. Students can learn how decontextualizing lines can add power, but can also alter meaning. Teaching Victorian Literature in the 21st Century devotes several chapters to “Digital Victorians,” all of which work towards introducing students to the past via technology. Some instructors have made Victorian novels feel more modern by reconceiving their serial structure as television series, creating classroom community in the process. Joe Bucolo’s “‘Survivor: Satis House’: Creating Classroom Community while Teaching Dickens in a Reality-TV World” (2011) describes one such project. Many students connect well with these methods. Similarly to Bourrier and Bucolo, perhaps, Susan Cook and Elizabeth Henley noticed the need to create reading communities to teach literature. Their class designed functioning web pages to reach beyond the classroom, and they sought to return the story to its original serialized publication format. Students, now more like Victorian r

FAQs

How does teaching “Hunted Down” support students’ understanding of Dickens?

By presenting the story in its original serialized context and then performing a dramatic reading for a community partner, students better grasp Dickens’s concerns and his relationship to cultural status, ethics, and marginalized characters.

What relevance problem do scholars identify when teaching Victorian literature today?

Professors of British literature seek ways to connect nineteenth-century novels to twenty-first-century students, noting the difficulty of engaging long works within a college semester and the need to justify their relevance.

Why does the paper connect Dickens teaching to service learning?

It argues that service learning meaningfully connects course instruction with community needs, and that the story’s emphasis on professionals helping in the domestic sphere aligns with helping people who are in need.

Oct 15, 2026

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