Fortune's Wheel Dickens and the Iconography of Women's Time

"Drawing on a history of both literary and visual representations of Fortune, Elizabeth Campbell argues that Dickens's contribution to both the iconographic and narrative traditions was to fuse the classical image of the wheel with the industrial one. Campbell's close reading of Dickens reveals that, as the wheel was increasingly identified as the official Victorian symbol for British industrial and economic progress, he reacted by employing this icon to represent a more pessimistic historical vision - as the tragic symbol for human fate in the nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.