Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in Nineteenth-Century London, and: The Magic Lantern: Representation of the Double in Dickens (review)

Both titles under review here present a Charles Dickens who anticipated later thinkers: Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, and so on, until the list of those whose work was anticipated by Dickens avant la lettre stretches to a dizzying length. While Dickens and the Unreal City supplements its argument about Dickens's prescience with a sustained reading of the contemporary discourses to which the novels were responding, both studies are most interested in how Dickens transcended his culture and in the various ways that he was ahead of his time.

Taking its cue from The Waste Land (1922), Karl Ashley Smith's book argues that Dickens's representation of London served as a test of the adequacy of religious symbolism in the nineteenth century, as a means for the novels to explore whether Christianity "still had anything to say to a modern world deeply in need of a regenerating revelation" (4). Dickens's London becomes, in Smith's hands, a complex network of symbols drawn from popular religion, various secular discourses, and the realities of metropolitan life, a network so vast and polyphonous that it cannot be perceived or grasped in its totality. After a useful exposition of Dickens's religious beliefs (a discussion in which Smith adeptly steers a course between the novels and various extra-fictional sources, including letters, speeches, and "The Life of Our Lord"), Dickens and the Unreal City examines the conflicted meanings contained in a handful of these component symbols: "haunted" houses, urban filth, the detective, the railway, the river, and the crowd. Most of these symbols have been treated at length in Dickens criticism, but Smith is able to offer new insights by charting how each "plays a part in the narrative's tension between denying the possibility of transcendent revelations and working towards them" (33). That is, Smith explores how each fits into a drama of concealment and discovery enacted in the novels: concealment and discovery of, for instance, the light of religion, the sacrifice of Christ, true identities and relationships, or the debt each resident of London owes to his or her neighbor in Dickens's works-based Christianity. More broadly, Smith traces the ambiguous messages this complex of symbols relays about the presence or absence of a Providential force overseeing—and lending meaning to—existence, as well as about the possibility of regeneration in the nineteenth century.

Smith's study is particularly valuable for the reminder it offers of the centrality of Christianity to Dickens's worldview. Even more valuable is the evidence Smith marshals regarding the prominent place Christianity continued to hold in various Victorian discourses in which we might not expect it to figure, such as that of sanitary reform. Smith's chapter on dirt and sanitation in Dickens is perhaps the strongest in the book. An important part of Smith's case here relates to the moral effect of urban filth on London's inhabitants; however, because he uses as his primary source for the Victorian discourse of dirt a substantially later text—John Ruskin's Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880–81)—Smith treats these moral effects as wholly metaphoric. A closer examination of the writings of mid-century reformers would have shown the frequency with which such writers asserted that dirt's degrading influence on morality was owing to the real changes filth could effect in the mind and brain. This is, for example, the point of the Household Words articles "The Treatment of the Insane" (1851) and "Sick Body, Sick Brain" (1854). Similarly, although recent scholarship has begun to reveal Dickens's substantial interest and wide reading in the psychological theorizing of his contemporaries, Smith does...