The Bourgeois Interior

3 Charles Dickens andthe Victorian Addictionto Dwelling

60 qWWe u U Q฀w฀wE 3 Charles Dickens and the Victorian Addiction to Dwelling The Bourgeois Domestic Ideal and Dickens’s Life A dialectic of growth and decay is rooted in bourgeois history .1 The Industrial Revolution, which entered its first stage in the late eighteenth century, granted the bourgeois class unprecedented power at the same time that it steadily eroded bourgeois domestic traditions that had been in place for centuries . The sense of enclosure, the comfortable distance from a public world, the equilibrium within the privacy of the agrarian home, in which activities and rituals were tied to the natural cycle: all were disrupted by industrialization. In the portrait of Fanny Price at Portsmouth, Austen shows the homesick response to this upheaval; and in her description of the Prices’ townhouse, in which home and street are brought into close proximity, she looks forward to the urban dwellings one finds in every Dickens novel. The bourgeois now lived in a world where privacy had to be created. The interpenetration of private and public spaces and the “dangerous contiguousness” of the domestic and the criminal spheres are a primary means of registering the social anxieties created by the industrial city in Dickens’s works. As Gareth Cordery suggests, there is no need for Bill Sykes to take Oliver Twist out of the middle-class domestic world of the Maylie cottage and back to Fagin’s den “because his bourgeois fears and anxieties do that for him, and in doing so mock the middle class attempt to wall him in.”2 Cruikshank’s illustration of Oliver sleeping at Rose Maylie’s cottage, as Fagin and Monks stand Dickens and Victorian Dwelling 61 at the open lattice watching him, suggests that the violation of bourgeois space is both reality and dream, both something that was happening and something that was feared (p. 63). Here the social and psychological readings of bourgeois dwelling overlap, and we are once again reminded of Benjamin’s use of Freud to interpret the nineteenth-century resistance to urban “shock.” Like the vulnerability of consciousness to traumatic memory, the protective cover of bourgeois domesticity is never entirely secure. In the image of the sleeping Oliver, the sense of invaded privacy is communicated by means of the central placement of the window. (In Dutch genre paintings of interiors, a feeling of protected enclosure is achieved in part by placing windows to the side of the frame. Often, as in Vermeer’s The Love Letter , light comes from an unseen window, intensifying the sense of privacy.) The trespassers, who wear menacing expressions, are placed directly before us and make us anxious for Oliver’s safety. Dickens worked closely with Cruikshank on the details in the illustrations, and his ambivalence about the threat posed by Fagin is suggested in the position of the vase. It would almost appear that Fagin is bringing Oliver flowers in one hand and holding a dagger (in actuality, his cane) in the other. In directing Cruikshank to create illustrations such as this one, Dickens exploits the fact that rich and poor sections of urban areas were in close proximity, a fact that the bourgeoisie successfully denied, in part through creating unusually cosseted interior spaces. In his narrative descriptions of the domestic interior, snug spaces abound, and repeated references to walls, closets, corners, and drawers suggest a longing for protection and security. Like David Copperfield, who delights in the snug bed within a closet within his mother’s room or the tiny bed he occupies at the Peggottys, Dickens himself was drawn to the coziness of the smaller space within the larger. He erected a chalet in the garden of Gad’s Hill that resembled a doll’s house and enjoyed staying in snug quarters abroad.3 The storage of objects at the Midshipman’s in Dombey and Son, in which “ob- 62 The Bourgeois Interior jects of brass and glass” find their home in “mahogany nests,” cases, corners, and cushions, gives the impression that “extraordinary precautions” are being taken to ensure stability.4 The fortresslike character of the Victorian domestic interior inspired Walter Benjamin to write that the “nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as the receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of a compass case, where...