Building Works

In the August 1850 number of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), released just as Parliament would have departed for its break, a prostitute named Martha turns a corner at Westminster Abbey. Night has fallen, and Martha is hurrying to the Thames near Millbank. David and Mr Peggotty follow her, trusting that she will lead them to the lost Little Em’ly. All at once, David realises what the desperate young woman by the water’s edge intends to do, and helps to change her mind before it is too late.

David Copperfield is not usually grouped with Dickens’s great London novels: its main concern seems to be the growth of the individual rather than the growth of the city. Nevertheless, David reveals how sensitive he is to space throughout his autobiography, and this moment is no different. He can see ‘the rags of last year’s handbills’ on the wooden piles, ‘fluttering above high-water mark’ and ‘offering rewards for drowned men’. With its hellish factories, ‘great blank Prison’, ‘sluggish ditch’, ‘coarse grass’, and ‘rank weeds’, the neighbourhood around Millbank is ‘as oppressive, sad and solitary by night, as any about London’. It draws London’s most abject individuals, who are effaced as the city continues to expand. Instead of progress and optimism, David sees ‘corruption’, ‘decay’, and decomposition.

A thought-provoking new book by Joanna Hofer-Robinson, Dickens and Demolition: Literary Afterlives and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Urban Development, considers these narratives of progress in all their ambivalence and complexity. Hofer-Robinson’s reading of the Copperfield scene draws attention to a particularly striking feature of the landscape near Millbank: here, David sees ‘carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rott[ing] away’.¹ Hofer-Robinson explains that this is a ‘mothballed housing development . . . forestalled before its completion’: one of many examples of ‘unsuccessful capitalist speculation’ that ‘worsens already insanitary conditions in certain districts’ (pp. 27–8). In a coming-of-age novel about the search for a home – David is looking for the place where he belongs – these ‘carcases of houses’ remind middle-class Victorian readers of the lives playing out in their peripheral vision. They speak to the scattershot nature of urban design and to serious challenges in the financial system – the strange domestic husks are a physical testament to irresponsible investment. They also belong to a psychological landscape of abortive dreams and misplaced hopes.

Dickens and Demolition tells the story of a city under construction, describing in rich detail the slum clearances, housing projects, and developments in infrastructure and sanitation that fell under the broad parameters of ‘metropolitan improvement’. More precisely, it discusses the very tangible role Dickens and his fiction played in these schemes. Dickens certainly engaged with mothballing, jerry-building, clearances, and the coming of the railways in his writing, bringing them to the centre of his imagined London, but Hofer-Robinson reveals how frequently his novels were used to justify demolition and construction in the real city: Dickens, she argues, ‘had a material legacy that is traceable in London’s built environment’ (p.3). Using a series of case studies, she demonstrates how ‘tropes and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly mobilized to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about London’s built environment and linked social problems’ (p. 3). His novels, especially Oliver Twist (1837–9), gave commentators ‘a representational or rhetorical toolkit that could be mobilized in diverse ways to persuade their audience of the benefits of specific reforms’ (p. 4). Building upon works of urban history such as Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon (2000), as well as criticism on the legacies of literature by Mary Hammond, Juliet John and Ann Rigney, this book underscores the importance of ‘Dickensian afterlives’: adapted and appropriated nuggets of literature, which turned up in political chambers, illegitimate theatres, and charity bazaars.² For example, Hofer-Robinson uncovers the Holborn Town Hall’s efforts to make up the cost of a church restoration in 1888: ‘The...