Coda

The Coda offers a reprise of the book’s the central arguments. Namely, that Dickens’s legacies can be traced in surprising, physical effects in London’s built environment. By exploring polymodal afterlives of his fiction over which he had no control, as well as his interventions in contemporary urban issues, Dickens and Demolition proposes that the impact of literary works lingers in the world around us in ways of which we may not always be conscious. Indeed, Dickensian afterlives are traceable in demolitions that have erased areas of Old London from the capital. The Coda restates that the potential of Dickensian afterlives to effect public debate and physical spaces in this manner was enabled by a particular set of circumstances, which were already being reformed during Dickens’s lifetime. Nevertheless, questions are raised about other authors, cities and countries.

Paperwork and Philanthropy: Dickens’s Involvement in Metropolitan Improvement

This chapter analyses Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century philanthropic works alongside an investigation of Dickens’s personal involvement in a scheme to improve London’s provision of housing stock for the East End poor. Dickens collaborated with a number of his social network on this project, including Angela Burdett Coutts and Dr Thomas Southwood Smith. His chief contributions were bureaucratic, and, contemporaneously with this work, he explored tensions between the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of paperwork in Bleak House. Thus, this chapter suggests that Dickens’s practical and administrative involvement in charity work informed his imaginative representation of the utility and futility of paperwork, and how he conceptualised the effectiveness of different forms of writing. Dickens famously contended for pet causes in his fiction, but the various ways in which Dickens’s works were appropriated by other people, and recontextualised to promote or to criticise philanthropic projects, reveal that his writing was not always useful in the sense that he imagined. Indeed, the instrumentality of Dickens’s fiction to effect charitable projects was often indirect. For example, philanthropists, including Mary Carpenter and Octavia Hill, curated literary afterlives to enhance the effectiveness of their arguments in published treatises, even though the novels are not always relevant to their causes.

Sets and the City: Staging London and Oliver Twist

This chapter tracks multiple ways in which Oliver Twist and London’s cityscape were adapted for the stage in the late 1830s. It argues that London was a flexible frame through which the audience’s reception of Dickens’s work was mediated in early dramatisations, but also that the novel was imaginatively mapped on to the built environment. For example, Sadler’s Wells emphasise the proximity of the criminal scenes by staging their adaptation as a local drama, while the Surrey Theatre presents their play as an opportunity for armchair tourism. In staging alternative versions of the city, theatres presented differently nuanced portrayals of its inhabitants and perceived social problems. The dynamic re-presentation of Oliver Twist in early theatrical adaptations is thereby indicative of the malleability of Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century improvement debates, and these plays were likewise supposed to have an effect on contemporary city-life. Playscripts, stagecraft, actors’ performances, music, and the perceived identities of theatres and their audiences each played a role in curating these representations, and so this chapter adopts an intertheatrical methodology.

Introduction

Sentimental obituaries published after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 remark that phrases and characters from his fiction “[mingle] with our daily converse and our daily life” (Glasgow Herald, 11 Jun. 1870, p. 4). This is certainly true. However, the convivial tone of this eulogy obscures how literary afterlives were appropriated to argue for material changes to London’s built environment, the effects of which were often misaligned with Dickens’s broadly humanitarian ethos. For example, tropes, extracts, and characters from his novels were mobilised to advocate the demolition of insanitary and overcrowded slum areas, but such modernisations were rarely accompanied by the building of new housing for the displaced population. The introduction to Dickens and Demolition introduces these central concerns of the book: to trace Dickensian afterlives across multiple media and fora; to examine what role these afterlives played in urban development discourses; and to argue that fiction was part of the dialectical relations between past, present and future, through which London’s modernisation was conceived and represented. The chapter also introduces key terminology, such as remediation, appropriation, and adaptation.

Charles Dickens and Metropolitan Improvements

For readers who are unfamiliar with the historical contexts underpinning London’s improvement in the mid-nineteenth century, Chapter 1 offers an account of the processes and problems of improvement during Dickens’s lifetime. Addressing the fragmentation of the built environment and the diverse actors and institutions who commented on and influenced metropolitan developments, it suggests that the haphazard nature of improvement in the mid-nineteenth century dovetailed generatively with Dickens’s style and popularity, and that this enabled his works to be used effectively to promote urban change. Far from suggesting that people credulously accepted Dickens’s descriptions as “realistic” accounts of contemporary London conditions, however, this chapter (and, indeed, the book as a whole) argues that mid-nineteenth-century users of Dickens treated his novels as a store of widely known imagery that could be superimposed on to the urban environment. Afterlives were self-consciously curated to enable discussion about large and complex social problems, to make users’ critiques more pointed and memorable, or to curate legible representations of the city.

From Sanitary Reform to Cultural Memory: The Case of Jacob’s Island

This chapter argues that we can track Dickensian afterlives in both the cultural processes by which cultural memories of Jacob’s Island have been constructed, and the processes that drove its material destruction earlier in the nineteenth century. Linked to outbreaks of cholera in the 1830s and 1840s, the slum was widely treated as a symbol which could help to galvanize metropolitan sanitary reform. Dickens’s representation of the site in Oliver Twist was repeatedly brought into these debates. The author was deeply invested in efforts to improve London’s sanitation, and like other commentators he returned to his early novel to support his campaigns. Both Dickens and other commentators presented Oliver Twist as an urgent call for contemporary reform; however, the novel’s afterlives soon changed in tone. As early as the 1870s, press commentators responded to the area’s physical alteration and evoked Oliver Twist as a record of a bygone city. By the 1880s, artists and writers nostalgically reimagined Dickens’s account of the site in an urban picturesque aesthetic. Today, Dickens is part of a heritage trail in the district, even though his representation also played a part in the demolition of Jacob’s Island.

Dickensian Afterlives and the Demolition of Field Lane

Field Lane was envisioned as a nexus of crime, overcrowding, foreignness, social unrest and insanitary conditions in representations of the district in multiple media and contexts in the mid-nineteenth century. In London more widely, these anxieties helped to shape how improvements were conceived, and which places were targeted for demolition. This chapter presents evidence that the improvements promised by advocates of Field Lane’s redevelopment were repeatedly articulated and conceptualised through references to Oliver Twist. For example, by emphasising its association with Fagin and Bill Sikes to draw attention to the slum as a dangerous locale. Focusing on appropriations of Dickens’s works in newspapers, periodicals and parliamentary debates, the chapter traces a proliferation of Dickensian afterlives in commentaries on Field Lane’s improvement before, during and after its demolition. Of course, as is the case with all the afterlives analysed in this book, the novel was variously appropriated, even when users commented on the same site or descriptive passage. However, it is in this instability that we can see how Dickensian afterlives were put to work in arguments for Field Lane’s demolition. His fiction provided a mobile and rhetorically effective vocabulary, which was easily manipulated to serve numerous interests.