Charles Dickens and the Properties of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dense Network ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
The Social ◽  
Literary Collaboration ◽  
Economic Relationship

This book explores the significance of rental culture in Charles Dickens’s fiction and journalism. It reveals tenancy, or the leasing of real estate in exchange for money, to be a governing force in everyday life in the nineteenth century. It casts a light into back attics and landladies’ parlours, and follows a host of characters—from slum landlords exploiting their tenants, to pairs of friends deciding to live together and share the rent. In this period, tenancy shaped individuals, structured communities, and fascinated writers. The vast majority of London’s population had an immediate economic relationship with the houses and rooms they inhabited, and Dickens was highly attuned to the social, psychological, and imaginative corollaries of this phenomenon. He may have been read as an overwhelming proponent of middle-class domestic ideology, but if we look closely, we see that his fictional universe is a dense network of rented spaces. He is comfortable in what he calls the ‘lodger world’, and he locates versions of home in a multitude of unlikely places. These are not mere settings, waiting to be recreated faithfully; rented space does not simply provide a backdrop for incident in the nineteenth-century novel. Instead, it plays an important part in influencing what takes place. For Dickens, to write about tenancy can often mean to write about writing—character, authorship, and literary collaboration. More than anything, he celebrates the fact that unassuming houses brim with narrative potential: comedies, romances, mysteries, and comings-of-age take place behind their doors.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-40
Author(s):  
Ushashi Dasgupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Property Market ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Preliminary Discussion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Economic Transaction

The Introduction offers a preliminary discussion of what Charles Dickens calls the ‘lodger world’, and it establishes the book’s main lines of argument. It explains that tenancy, an economic transaction realized in space, was a central aspect of everyday life in the nineteenth century. An overwhelming majority of Victorians did not own their homes outright. Instead, they were tenants: while single families could take entire houses on lease, lodgers lived in rooms overseen by landladies, and these many kinds of rented space captured Dickens’s imagination. The pervasive need to rent in the period encourages a reassessment of middle-class domestic ideology. The Introduction surveys the history of the property market, reviews Dickens’s active participation in rental culture throughout his life, and describes a number of his creative relationships. It considers the ‘spatial turn’ in cultural studies, and ultimately sets up a link between rented space, narrative, and genre in Dickens’s thinking.

Chicago's Mecca Flat Blues

1998 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 382-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bluestone
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Residential Buildings ◽  
Architectural History ◽  
Chicago School ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Political Landscape ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Point Of Departure

This essay explores the Mecca, one of Chicago's largest nineteenth-century apartment houses. Designed in 1891, the Mecca's innovative plan incorporated an exterior landscaped courtyard and two monumental interior atria. The form and meaning of these spaces diverged in important respects. The exterior courtyards appropriated aspects of the single-family residential form and domestic ideology. The interior atria relied on Chicago skyscraper models and their cosmopolitan approach to the possibilities of density. Exterior courtyards later proliferated, while atria appeared in only two other local residential buildings. Nevertheless, the Mecca's atria possessed a sense of place that deeply etched the building into Chicago's cultural and political landscape. The building became the subject of 1920s blues improvisation-the "Mecca Flat Blues." In the 1940s and 1950s tenants waged a decadelong Mecca preservation campaign. Housing rather than Chicago School aesthetics provided the preservationists with their point of departure. Race interesected with space and Mies van der Rohe's vision of modern urbanism to seal the Mecca's fate. The essay's methodology develops the social and cultural meaning of form. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of pushing architectural history beyond the nexus of meaning created by original patrons and designers. We stand to learn a great deal about architectural and urban history by studying how people have defined and redefined, valued and devalued, their buildings, cities, and landscapes.

“SAVING BRITISH NATIVES”: FAMILY EMIGRATION AND THE LOGIC OF SETTLER COLONIALISM IN CHARLES DICKENS AND CAROLINE CHISHOLM

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-280
Author(s):  
Terra Walston Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
British Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second Empire ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
The Social ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Emotional Identification

As Cambridge historian J. R. Seeley writes inThe Expansion of England (1883), the fear of colonial secession, inspired by that of the United States, haunted Britons’ perception of their “second Empire” throughout the nineteenth century, effectively working against a sense of shared national destiny with the white settlers of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia (14–15). One important way Victorian writers combatted the “optimistic fatalism” Seeley observed in his fellow Britons was through an imperial economy of affect, which circulated sentiment and stressed emotional identification between settlers and metropolitan Britons (15). If mid-nineteenth-century British literature can be said to negotiate the tensions of Britain's empire through representations of racial, cultural, and linguistic difference, then narratives of sameness – of British families across the oceans – offer models for cohering the British settler empire. In such a model, techniques designed to reinforce the sentimental bonds of settlers to their families might also reinforce the social, political, and affective connections of the settlers to the metaphorical “mother country.”

scholarly journals Social representations and ideology: Theories of common sense about COVID-19 among middle-class Brazilians and their ideological implications

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-122
Author(s):  
Luiz Gustavo Silva Souza ◽  
Emma O’Dwyer ◽  
Sabrine Mantuan dos Santos Coutinho ◽  
Sharmistha Chaudhuri ◽  
Laila Lilargem Rocha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Phenomenological Approach ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
Related Risk ◽  
The Social

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of billions of people worldwide. Individuals and groups were compelled to construct theories of common sense about the disease to communicate and guide practices. The theory of social representations provides powerful concepts to analyse the psychosocial construction of COVID-19. This study aimed to understand the social representations of COVID-19 constructed by middle-class Brazilian adults and their ideological implications, providing a social-psychological analysis of these phenomena while the pandemic is still ongoing. We adopted a qualitative approach based on semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted online in April-May 2020. Participants were 13 middle-class Brazilians living in urban areas. We analysed the interviews with thematic analysis and a phenomenological approach. The social representations were organised around three themes: 1) a virus originated in human actions and with anthropocentric meanings (e.g., a punishment for the human-led destruction of the environment); 2) a dramatic disease that attacks the lungs and kills people perceived to have “low immunity”; and 3) a disturbing pandemic that was also conceived as a correction event with positive consequences. The social representations included beliefs about the individualistic determination of immunity, the attribution of divine causes to the pandemic, and the need for the moral reformation of humankind. The discussion highlights the ideological implications of these theories of common sense. Socially underprivileged groups are at greater COVID-19-related risk, which the investigated social representations may contribute to conceal and naturalise.

The Country Book

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-161
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
National Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Suburban Development ◽  
A Site ◽  
Suburban Life

Picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most consequential reconfigurations of American understandings of national space. This suburban development had its own popular literary genre in the period, the country book. Although the country book is now largely forgotten and many of its more prominent examples have lapsed into obscurity, canonical writers such as Herman Melville wrote in the genre, and Thoreau’s Walden can also be understood in the context of this genre. The country book’s vision of the suburbs as a site of picturesque male domesticity that allowed for both privacy and homosocial intimacy countered a dominant vision of urban masculinity as public, individualistic, and competitive. Although the country book in general offers an idealized vision of male suburban life, individual texts also often feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. The country book promoted the imaginative investments in suburban development at the same time that it hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-class masculine identity that foreclosed on that dream. In this way, as with the park movement texts discussed in Chapter 3, the country books that supported mid-nineteenth-century suburban development expressed both the social aspirations and fears of bourgeois men.

Idolatrous Reading

2015 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy L. Carens
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽  
Unhealthy Food ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
Patriarchal Culture

Timothy L. Carens, “Idolatrous Reading: Subversive Fantasy and Domestic Ideology” (pp. 238–266) In nineteenth-century Britain, patriarchal culture revealed its anxieties about female subjectivity and anxiety through an extensive debate about what young women should read. As critics have already shown, many writers in the period disparaged romantic novels by comparing them to unhealthy food, addictive drugs, or even illicit sexual encounters. The figure of idolatry played a significant role in this debate as well, suggesting that young female readers might betray the true god of the middle-class patriarchal order by worshiping more gratifying alternatives. If the language of idolatry generally connoted heretical transgression, emergent feminist writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon found that they could also use it to articulate a woman’s longing for the power to shape her own dreams. In Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864), a figure used to disparage women who neglect their role within the domestic order thus acquires a new and intensely ironic life as a way to imagine an escape from it.

scholarly journals ELEMENTOS SUPERESTRUTURAIS NA PRODUÇÃO DO ESPAÇO SUBURBANO

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-131
Author(s):  
Francisco Clébio Rodrigues Lopes
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Real Estate ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Real Estate Developers ◽  
The Relationship

Este artigo analisa aspectos superestruturais na produção do espaço a partir da relação entre ideologia e suburbanização. Em termos teórico-metodológicos, conta com uma revisão de componentes da superestrutura marxista cruzados com textos publicitários de incorporadoras imobiliárias. Conclui que a moradia suburbana de classe média é a materialização da ideologia, pois a forma segregada é produto de um sistema de ideias que se corporificou ao interferir no espaço social.Palavras-chave: Urbanização. Representação e ideologia. ABSTRACTThis paper examines superstructural aspects in the production of space from the relationship between ideology and suburbanization. In theoretical and methodological terms, it includes a review of components of Marxist superstructure crossed with advertising copies of real estate developers. It concludes that the suburban housing middle class is the materialization of ideology, because the segregated form is the product of a system of ideas that is embodied by interfering in the social space.Keywords: urbanization, representation and ideology. RESUMENEste artículo analiza aspectos superestructurales en la producción del espacio a partir de la relación entre ideología y suburbanización. En términos teórico-metodológicos, cuenta con una revisión de componentes de la superestructura marxista cruzados con textos publicitarios de incorporadoras inmobiliarias. Concluye que la vivienda suburbana de clase media es la materialización de la ideología, pues la forma aislada es producto de un sistema de ideas que se ha concretado al interferir en el espacio social.Palabras clave: urbanización; representación; ideología.

Charles Dickens and the Victorian “Mormon Moment”

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (5) ◽  
pp. 489-506
Author(s):  
Scott Dransfield
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Salt Lake ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Significance ◽  
Healthy Working ◽  
Cultural Status ◽  
New Religion

Abstract The growth of Mormonism in England in the middle of the nineteenth century presented a number of challenges relating to the cultural status of the new religion and its followers. Charles Dickens’s “uncommercial traveller” sketch describing a group of 800 Mormon converts preparing to emigrate to the United States, “Bound for the Great Salt Lake,” represents the challenge effectively. While Mormons were quickly identified by their heresies and by those qualities that characterized cultural and religious otherness, they were also observed to possess traits of Englishness, reflecting the image of a healthy working class. This article considers the tensions among these contradictory qualities and traces them to a middle-class “secular gospel” that Dickens articulates in his novels. Dickens utilizes this “gospel”—an ethic that valorizes work and domestic order as bearing religious significance—to perceive the followers of the new religion.

Animal Bodies: Corporeality, Class, and Subject Formation in The Wide, Wide World

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-533 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Mason
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
Recent Criticism ◽  
Horseback Riding ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Domestic Ideology ◽  
New Methods ◽  
Middle Class Woman ◽  
Historical Contextualization

In recent criticism, arguments about whether domesticity in The Wide, Wide World (1850) empowered or disempowered women, and whether it was embraced or critiqued by Warner and her contemporaries, have been founded upon, or at least buttressed by, readings of horses and horsemanship. The interpretation of Ellen Montgomery's riding lessons as a metaphor for her disempowerment, and the ubiquitous denunciation of John Humphreys as "brutal horse-beater," however, have little grounding in the nineteenth-century horsemanship on which Warner drew. While for centuries horses in Western culture had been associated with human passions and horsemanship with their forcible domination, a combination of new methods for disciplining equines and new forms of recreational riding rendered the equine body, in the nineteenth century, discursively situated to communicate the internalized discipline and self-regulation that was necessary to make a human body middle class. Through horseback riding and other lessons, Ellen attains the particular mental and bodily development necessary for her to become a proper, sentimental, middle-class woman who is inserted into a network of power relations-a network in which Ellen attains power over other kinds of women who fail to meet the standards that she does. Historical contextualization also reveals that John's horsemanship accords quite well with nineteenth-century standards and would not have been seen as abusive by his contemporaries. As nearly all arguments about The Wide, Wide World's resistance to domestic ideology have been predicated upon John's propensity for horse-beating, this essay calls for a reexamination of what has become a principal claim of Warner criticism.

Character

Picture World ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 21-83
Author(s):  
Rachel Teukolsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Urban Economy ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Realist Novel ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
History Of

“Character” is often studied as the deep psychological self crafted by the nineteenth-century realist novel. Yet Chapter 1 proposes an alternative history of character by looking to caricature, in some of the earliest comics (“Galleries of Comicalities”) appearing in sporting newspapers in the 1830s. Early caricatures portrayed an idea of character that was grotesque, masculinist, and brilliantly exteriorized, especially in depictions of “the cockney,” the urban mischief-man whose subversive masculinity reflected the economic pressures of the new urban economy. Cartoons featuring the cockney were anti-authoritarian, carnivalesque, and often laced with crude racism and misogyny. Their mock-violent energy gave voice to some of the explosive frustration felt by working- and lower-middle-class men after the failures of the Reform Bill of 1832. The young Charles Dickens borrowed many of his earliest subjects from extant caricature motifs, reflecting some of the fundamental instabilities of social class and economic precarity defining the Reform Era.

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